In empty space, quantum particles flit in and out of existence, electromagnetic fields permeate the vacuum, and space itself trembles with gravitational waves. What may seem like nothingness paradoxically teems with activity.
In Void: The Strange Physics of Nothing, physicist and philosopher James Owen Weatherall explores how physicists’ beliefs about nothingness have changed over several revolutionary periods. The void, Weatherall argues, is physics distilled to its bare essence. If physicists can’t agree on the properties of empty space, they won’t be able to explain the physics of planets or particles either. Scientists have argued over nothingness since the early days of physics. Vacant space was unthinkable to Aristotle, and Descartes so abhorred the idea of a vacuum that he posited that an invisible “plenum” suffused the gaps between objects. But Isaac Newton upended this view, arguing that space was just a barren container into which matter is placed.
Since then, physicists have continued to flip-flop on this issue. The discovery in the mid-1800s that light is an electromagnetic wave led scientists to conclude that a vibrating medium, an “ether,” filled space. Just as sound waves vibrate the air, physicists thought there must be some medium for light waves to ripple. Albert Einstein tore down that idea with his special theory of relativity. Since the speed of light was the same for all observers, no matter their relative speeds, he reasoned, light could not be traveling through some absolute, stationary medium. But he later predicted, as part of his general theory of relativity, that space itself can ripple with gravitational waves (SN: 3/5/16, p. 6) — suggesting that the void is not quite empty.
Under the modern view of quantum physics, various fields pervade all of space, and particles are simply excitations, or waves, in these fields. Even in a vacuum, experiments show, fluctuating fields produce a background of transient particles and antiparticles. Does a space pulsating with gravitational waves and bubbling with particles really qualify as empty? It depends on the scientific definition of “nothing,” Weatherall argues, which may not conform to intuition.
Weatherall serves readers a fairly typical buffet of physics theories, dishing up Newtonian mechanics, relativity, quantum mechanics and a small helping of string theory. But he does this through a lens that highlights connections between those theories in a novel way. Weatherall contends, for instance, that differing notions of nothingness between theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics could help explain why scientists are still struggling to unite the two ideas into one theory of quantum gravity.
Exploring the physics of nothing demands quite a bit of wading through the physics of something, and it’s not always clear how the threads Weatherall is following will lead back to the void. When he finally makes these connections, though, they often reveal insights that are missed in the typical focus on things of substance.
SAN DIEGO — A small number of people maintain razor-sharp memories into their 90s, despite having brains chock-full of the plaques and tangles linked to Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers suspect that these people’s brains are somehow impervious to the usual devastation thought to be caused by those plaques and tangles.
Researchers studied the brains of people 90 years old or older who had excellent memories, performing as well as people in their 50s and 60s on some tests. Postmortem brain tissue from eight such people revealed a range of Alzheimer’s features. Two participants had remarkably clean brains with few signs of amyloid-beta plaques and tangles of tau protein. Four participants had middling levels. Surprisingly, the other two samples were packed with plaques and tangles, enough to qualify those people for an Alzheimer’s diagnosis based on their brains. “These people, for all practical purposes, should be demented,” study coauthor Changiz Geula of Northwestern University’s medical school said November 15 in a news briefing at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.
Further tests revealed that even in the midst of these Alzheimer’s hallmarks, nerve cells survived in people with strong memories. Those people had more healthy-looking nerve cells than people with dementia and similar plaque and tangle levels. The researchers don’t know how these mentally sharp people avoid the ravages thought to be caused by plaques and tangles. “What’s surprising is this segment of people does exist,” Geula says. “We have to find out why.”
The new record-holder for fastest flying animal isn’t a bat out of hell. It’s a bat from Brazil, a new study claims. Brazilian free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis) can reach ground speeds of 160 kilometers per hour.
It’s unclear why they need that kind of speed to zoom through the night sky, but Brazilian bats appear to flap their wings in a similar fashion to ultrafast birds, an international group of researchers report November 9 in Royal Society Open Science. A sleek body, narrow wings and a wingspan longer than most other bats’ doesn’t hurt either.
Radio transmitters attached to the backs of seven bats allowed the team, led by evolutionary biologist Gary McCracken of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, to track the flight path and speed of the bats after they emerged from a cave in southwestern Texas. All seven reached almost 100 km/hr when flying horizontally; one bat hit about 160 km/hr.
Until now, common swifts held the record of fastest fliers, soaring at up to 112 km/hr, often with help from wind and gravity. The Brazilian bats, however, reached their higher speeds with no assist. Since bat flight is rarely studied, there may be even faster bats out there, the researchers speculate.
When Christian Agrillo runs number-related experiments in his lab, he wishes his undergraduate subjects good luck. For certain tests, that’s about all he says. Giving instructions to the people would be unfair to the fish.
Agrillo, of the University of Padua in Italy, is finishing up several years of pitting humans against fish in trials of their abilities to compare quantities. He can’t, of course, tell his angelfish or his guppies to choose, say, the larger array of dots. So in recent tests he made the bemused students use trial and error too. “At the end, they start laughing when they find they are compared with fish,” he says. Yet the fish versus humans face-offs are eye-opening comparisons in his search for the deep evolutionary basis of what has blossomed into human mathematics. If it turns out that fish and people share some idiosyncrasies of their number sense (like spidey sense, except focused on quantities rather than danger), those elements might in theory date from a common ancestor more than 400 million years old. Comparisons of animals’ mental powers are “the paleontology of cognition,” Agrillo says.
No one seriously argues that animals other than people have some kind of symbolic numeral system, but nonhuman animals — a lot of them — can manage almost-math without numbers.
“There’s been an explosion of studies,” Agrillo says. Reports of a quantity-related ability come from chickens, horses, dogs, honeybees, spiders, salamanders, guppies, chimps, macaques, bears, lions, carrion crows and many more. And nonverbal number sensing, studies now suggest, allows much fancier operations than just pointing to the computer screen that shows more dots.
News stories on this diversity often nod to the idea that such a broad sweep of numberlike savvy across the animal tree of life could mean that animals all inherited rudiments of quantification smarts from a shared ancestor. Some scientists think that idea is too simple. Instead of inheriting the same mental machinery, animals could have just happened upon similar solutions when confronting the same challenge. (Birds and bats both fly, but their wings arose independently.)
Chasing down those deep origins means figuring out how animals, including humans too young or too rushed, manage quantitative feats without counting. It’s not easy. Putting together what should be a rich and remarkable story of the evolution of nonverbal number sense is just beginning. Who’s (sort of) counting? Symbolic numbers do marvels for humankind, but for millions of years, other animals without full powers to count have managed life-and-death decisions about magnitude (which fruit pile to grab, which fish school to join, whether there are so many wolves that it’s time to run). Counting dog treats For a sense of the issues, consider the old and the new in dog science. Familiar as dogs are, they’re still mostly wet-nosed conundrums when it comes to their number sense.
When food is at stake, dogs can tell more from less, according to a string of laboratory studies over more than a decade. And dogs may be able to spot cheating when people count out treats. Dog owners may not be amazed at such food smarts, but the interesting question is whether dogs solve the problem by paying attention to the actual number of goodies they see, or some other qualities.
An experiment in England in 2002, for instance, let 11 pet dogs settle down in front of a barrier that researchers then moved so the dogs could get a peek at a row of bowls. One bowl held a Pedigree Chum Trek treat. The barrier went up again, and researchers lowered a second treat into a bowl behind the screen, or sometimes just pretended to. When the barrier dropped again, the dogs overall stared a bit longer if only one treat was visible than if 1 + 1 had indeed equaled 2. Five of the dogs, in an extra test, also stared longer on average after a researcher covertly sneaked an extra treat into a bowl and then lowered the barrier on the unexpected 1 + 1 = 3.
Dogs could in theory recognize funny business by paying attention to the number of treats — or the treats’ “numerosity,” as researchers often call a quantity recognized nonverbally. But, depending on the design of a test, dogs might also get the right answers by judging the total surface area of treats instead of their numerosity. A multitude of other clues — density of objects in a cluster, a cluster’s total perimeter or darkness and so on — would also work. Researchers lump those giveaways under the term “continuous” qualities, because they change in a smooth continuum of increments instead of in the discrete 1, 2, 3.
The continuous qualities present a real staring-at-the-ceiling, heavy-sigh challenge for anyone inventing a numerosity test. By definition, nonverbal tests don’t use symbols such as numbers, so an experimenter has to show something, and those somethings inevitably have qualities that intensify or dwindle as the numerosity does. To at least see whether dogs evaluate total area to choose more food, Krista Macpherson of the University of Western Ontario in Canada devised a task for her rough collie Sedona. The dog had already served as an experimental subject in Macpherson’s earlier test of whether real dogs would try to seek help for their owners in danger, as TV’s trusty Lassie did. Sedona hadn’t tried to seek help for Macpherson (no dog in the test aided its owner), but she had proved amenable to doing lab work, especially for bits of hot dog or cheese.
Sedona was put to work to select whichever of two magnet boards had a greater number of geometric shapes fastened to it. Macpherson varied the dimensions of black triangles, squares and rectangles so that their total surface area wasn’t a reliable clue to the right answer.
The idea came from an experiment involving monkeys that reacted to a computer touch screen. But “I’m all cardboard and tape,“ Macpherson says. Sedona was perfectly happy to look at two magnet boards fastened to cardboard boxes on the ground and then indicate her choice by knocking over a box.
Sedona in the end triumphed at picking the box with more geometric thingies regardless of area, though the project took considerable effort from both woman and beast. The dog worked through more than 700 trials, starting as simply as 0 versus 1 and eventually scoring better than chance scrutinizing bigger magnitudes, such as 6 versus 9, Macpherson and William A. Roberts reported in Learning and Motivation in 2013. (Eight versus nine finally stumped the collie, but more on patterns in accuracy later.) In a 2016 paper in Behavioural Processes, another lab hailed the Sedona research as the “only evidence of dogs’ ability to use numerical information.”
More is better Dogs might have number sense, but when, or how much, they use it is another matter, notes Clive Wynne of Arizona State University in Tempe, a coauthor of that 2016 paper. To see what dogs do in more natural situations, he and Maria Elena Miletto Petrazzini of the University of Padua designed a test offering pets at a doggie daycare a choice of two plates of cut-up treat strips. A mix of breeds considered such options as a few big treat strips versus a smaller total amount of treats cut up into numerous small pieces. The dogs, without Sedona’s arduous training, went for the greater total amount of food, regardless of the number of pieces. Of course they did; it’s food — more is better. Without controls, food tests may not be measuring numerosity at all.
It’s not just edibility that affects whether an animal pays attention to numerosity. Experience with similarity or differences in objects can matter. Rosa Rugani, also at Padua, has pioneered studying number sense in recently hatched chicks, which can learn experimental procedures fast if she gets them motivated. “One of the more fascinating challenges of my job is to come up with ‘games’ the chicks like to play,” she says. Newly hatched chicks can develop a strong social attachment to objects, as if little plastic balls or ragged crosses of colored bars were pals to huddle near in a flock. Taking advantage of this tendency, Rugani let day-old chicks imprint on either two or three objects. Then she watched them choose between two little flocks of novel pals to toddle over to. If the potential buddy-objects in a flock looked identical to each other, the chicks in the test typically just moved near the larger cluster or largest object. But if the buddies in each group had individual quirks, mixing colors, shapes and sizes, the chicks paid attention to numerosity. Those imprinted on three pals were a bit more likely to club with three different kinds of pals; those imprinted on the pairs more often clubbed with the twos.
Some animals can deal with what people would call numerical order, or ordinality. Rats have learned to choose a particular tunnel entrance, such as the fourth or 10th from the end, even when researchers fiddled with distances between entrances. Five-day-old chicks rewarded for pecking at an item in a sequence, the fourth hole or the third jar, still showed a preference for position when researchers lengthened the distances between options or even moved the whole array.
Rhesus monkeys react if researchers violate rules of addition and subtraction, as dogs seemed to do in the Chums experiment. Chicks can track additions and subtractions too, well enough to pick the card hiding the bigger result. The chicks can also go one better. Rugani and colleagues have shown that chicks have some sense of ratios, for example choosing between mixes of red and green dots to match a ratio they learned from such mixes as 18 greens mingling with 9 reds.
A sense of numerosity itself, regardless of volume or surface area, may not be limited to fancy vertebrate brains. One recently published test takes advantage of overkill among golden orb-web spiders (Nephila clavipes). When they have a crazy run of luck catching insects faster than they can eat them, the spiders wrap each catch in silk and fasten it with a single strand to dangle from the center of the web. Turning this hoarding tendency into a test, Rafael Rodríguez of the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee tossed bits of mealworms of different sizes into the web as spiders created a dangling treasure trove. Then shooing the spider off the web, he snipped the strands and watched how long the spiders searched for their stolen meals. Losing a greater volume of food inspired more strumming of the web and searching about. But losing four items instead of just one or two increased the search time even more, Rodríguez and his colleagues reported in 2015 in Animal Cognition. It’s not just volume of food in a hoard, they argue. Numerosity has its own effects.
At a glance Nonhuman animals don’t have human language for counting, so researchers studying behavior talk about an “approximate number system” that allows for good-enough estimates of quantities with no real counting. One of the features of this still mysterious system is its declining accuracy in comparing bigger numbers that are very close together, the trend that made Sedona the collie’s struggles as noteworthy as her successes.
As the ratios of the two quantities Sedona had to compare drew closer to 1, she was more prone to make mistakes. Her scores worsened as she moved from 0.11 (comparing 1 to 9), 0.2 (1 to 5) and so on. She never conquered the fiendish 8 versus 9. That same trend, described by what’s called Weber’s law, shows up in humans’ nonverbal approximate number system as well as in those of other animals. When Agrillo tested guppies against humans, both fell behind in accuracy for such difficult comparisons as 6 versus 8. But for small quantities, both fish and people performed well, he and colleagues reported in 2012. People and fish could tell 3 dots from 4 about as reliably as 1 dot from 4. Researchers have long recognized this instant human ease of dealing with very small quantities, calling it subitizing: suddenly just seeing that there are three dots or ducks or daffodils without having to count them. Agrillo suspects the underlying mechanism will prove different from the approximate number systems, though he describes this as a minority view.
The similarity between guppies and people in subitizing skill doesn’t prove it’s a shared inheritance from that ancient common ancestor several hundred million years ago, Agrillo says. Yet the similarity does raise the possibility. Struggling to separate some pure response to numerosity from all the confounding surface areas and other continuous qualities may not even be the most important question, says Lisa Cantrell, now at the University of California, Davis. Human babies, as an example of noncounting animals, might start figuring out the world by relying on these other confounders and grow into their numerical abilities, she and Linda Smith of Indiana University, Bloomington, suggested in 2013. The hypothesized approximate number system might be part of some more general way of perceiving the world, which can draw on multiple clues to get a clearer sense of quantity. Cantrell and Smith called their version of the idea the “signal clarity hypothesis.”
Into their heads Studying behavior alone isn’t enough to trace the inheritance of any part of number savvy, says Andreas Nieder of the University of Tübingen in Germany. “At the behavioral level, it may look as if number estimation follows the same laws, but the underlying neural code could actually look quite different.”
He’s not going as far afield as fish yet, but Nieder and colleagues have looked at how monkey and bird brains handle quantity. The researchers described neurons (nerve cells) in the brains of carrion crows (Corvus corone corone) that function much like those in rhesus macaques.
Research in monkeys over the last 15 years has identified what Nieder calls “number neurons.” They could have multiple functions, but each responds to a specific number of whatevers, be it six crows or six crowbars. Some number neurons respond to sight, some to sound, and amazingly, some to either. The neurons could be responding to increasing total surface area or density or darkness. But researchers have varied one aspect at a time, and used multiple imaging and pharmacological techniques, to argue that as far as strenuous efforts can tell, these neurons detect the actual numerosity.
Individual neurons in parts of a monkey brain have their own preferred number and respond most strongly to it and less so to neighboring numbers. The neurons for three get less excited for two and four, while others light up at four. In 2015, Nieder and colleagues started untangling how monkey neurons handle zero, suggesting the beginnings of an ability to treat “nothing there” as an abstract numerosity of zero.
These neurons lie in notable places: the six-layered neocortex of the parietal and frontal lobes of the brain. That’s territory that primates boast about, a feature of mammalian brain structure credited with allowing human mental capacities to reach such heights. Nonmammalian vertebrates, including birds, don’t have a multilayered neocortex. Yet Nieder and colleagues have, for the first time, detected individual neurons in the bird brain that fire in response to numerosities much as primate number neurons do.
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Neurons for numbers Recordings from four nerve cells in monkeys suggest each cell responds most to a particular number of dots (lines with circles) and the same number of musical tones (squares). The bird versions of number neurons lie in a relatively newfangled area of the avian brain called the nidopallium caudolaterale, or NCL. It didn’t exist as such, nor did the primate’s precious neocortex, in the reptile-ish ancestors that mammals and birds last shared some 300 million years ago. Both the bird NCL and the primate number neuron zones arose from the same tissue, the pallium. In mammals, that ancient pallium morphed into layers of neocortex tissue, in birds the transformation went a different way.
For the number sense tingling through specialized neurons in birds and primates alike, similarity does not strictly mean shared inheritance, Nieder wrote in the June Nature Reviews Neuroscience. The systems of number neurons probably specialized independently.
Finding some brain structures to compare across deep time is a promising step in fathoming the evolution of animal number sense, but it’s just a beginning. There are many questions about how the neurons work, not to mention what’s going on in all those other brains that contemplate quantity. For now, looking across the tree of life at the crazy abundance of number smarts, which may or may not be related but are certainly numerous, the clearest thing to say may be just: Wow.
An oddball superconductor is the first of its kind — and if scientists are lucky, its discovery may lead to others.
At a frigid temperature 5 ten-thousandths of a degree above absolute zero, bismuth becomes a superconductor — a material that conducts electricity without resistance — physicists from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India, report online December 1 in Science.
Bismuth, a semimetallic element, conducts electricity less efficiently than an ordinary metal. It is unlike most other known superconductors in that it has very few mobile electrons. Consequently, the prevailing theory of superconductivity doesn’t apply. The result is “quite important,” says theoretical physicist Marvin Cohen of the University of California, Berkeley. New ideas — either a different theory or a tweak to the standard one — are needed to explain bismuth’s superconductivity. “It might lead us to a better theory of superconductivity with more details,” Cohen says.
An improved theoretical understanding might lead scientists to other superconductors, potentially ones that work at more practical temperatures, says Srinivasan Ramakrishnan, a coauthor of the paper. “It opens a new path for discovering new superconducting materials.”
Physicists’ ultimate goal is to find a superconductor that operates at room temperature. Such a material could be used to replace standard metals in wires and electronics, providing massive energy savings and technological leaps, from advanced supercomputers to magnetically levitating trains.
To confirm that bismuth was superconducting, Ramakrishnan and collaborators chilled ultrapure crystals of bismuth, while shielding the crystals from magnetic fields. Below 0.00053 kelvins (about –273° Celsius), the researchers observed a hallmark of superconductivity known as the Meissner effect, in which the superconductor expunges magnetic fields from within itself.
In the standard theory of superconductivity, electrons partner up in a fashion that removes resistance to their flow, thanks to the electrons’ interactions with ions in the material. But the theory, known as the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer, or BCS, theory, works only for materials with many free-floating electrons. A typical superconductor has about one mobile electron for each atom in the material, while in bismuth each electron is shared by 100,000 atoms. Bismuth has previously been made to superconduct when subjected to high pressure or when formed into nanoparticles, or when its atoms are disordered, rather than neatly arranged in a crystal. But under those conditions, bismuth behaves differently, so the BCS theory still applies. The new result is the first sign of superconducting bismuth in its normal form.
Another class of superconductors, known as high-temperature superconductors, likewise remains enigmatic (SN: 8/8/15, p. 12). Scientists have yet to reach a consensus on how they work. Though these superconductors must be cooled, they operate at relatively high temperatures, above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen (77 kelvins, or –196° Celsius).
Bismuth’s unusual behavior provides another handle with which to investigate the still-mysterious phenomenon of superconductivity. In addition to its low electron density and unexpected superconductivity, bismuth has several anomalous properties, including unusual optical and magnetic behavior. “A good global picture is missing” for explaining the abnormal element, says theoretical physicist Ganapathy Baskaran of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai, India. “I think it’s only a tip of an iceberg.”
In a better world, it would be the big news of the year just to report that Arctic sea ice shrank to 4.14 million square kilometers this summer, well below the 1981–2010 average of 6.22 million square kilometers (SN Online: 9/19/16). But in this world of changing climate, extreme summer ice loss has become almost expected. More novel in 2016 were glimpses of the complex biological consequences of melting at the poles and the opening of Arctic passageways, talked about for at least a decade and now well under way.
With top-of-the-world trade and tourist shortcuts opening, less ice means more travel. Europe-to-Asia shipping routes will typically shorten by about 10 days by midcentury, a report in Geophysical Research Letters predicted. Hopes for Northwest Passage routes obsessed (and killed) explorers in previous centuries, but in 2016, the thousand-passenger cruise ship Crystal Serenity offered the first megascale tourist trip from Alaska to New York with fine dining, casino gambling and an escort icebreaker vessel. Biologists are delving into consequences for organisms other than human tourists — or the much-discussed polar bear. “There’s been a marked shift in the research community,” says climate change ecologist Eric Post of the University of California, Davis. There’s new interest in considering more than just species that dwell on sea ice, with researchers looking for the less direct effects of declining ice. In the February Global Change Biology, eight scientists issued a call for observations of what could be early signs of faunal exchange: the mingling of Atlantic and Pacific species. One possible indicator is the sighting of gray whales off the coast of Namibia and also off Israel, even though that species went extinct in the Atlantic two centuries ago. These whales feed by snouting around in soft ocean bottoms, adding another predator to the system but also creating new habitat opportunities for some creatures (SN: 1/23/16, p. 14).
Since the call was published, biodiversity scientist Seabird McKeon of Colby College in Waterville, Maine, has heard new reports, such as a sighting of an ancient murrelet off the coast of Maine. It’s not the first wrong-coast report for the bird, which typically resides in the northern Pacific, but repeat sightings could be important, too. “What I think we’re seeing is not just new species coming across, but also perhaps an increased chance of survival and reproduction if more come over,” McKeon says. He is hoping to get new data from the online Encyclopedia of Life’s upcoming Fresh Data system, which connects scientists to people reporting nature observations. For terrestrial northerners, melting ice often means loss of mobility. Peary caribou on the 36,000 or more islands of Canada’s northern archipelago occasionally use ice bridges to travel to new territories and mix genes with other populations. Yet ice losses since 1979 have
made it some 15 percent harder
to find traveling paths, researchers reported in September inBiology Letters
(
SN: 10/29/16, p. 8
).
Even some plants such as dwarf birch probably travel by ice, scientists also reported in September in Biology Letters. Reconstructing long-ago sea ice extent and plant colonization dates suggests that seeds hitchhiked on slowly creeping frozen conveyors around northern Europe to colonize new territory at the end of the Ice Age. Losing ice roads could lead to tattered, disconnected populations as recolonization becomes less likely. Yet, there are pluses and minuses, says Post, who is helping to develop a package of scientific articles for Biology Letters on the biological effects of sea ice loss. Reseeding populations after a wipeout could be more difficult with tattered ice, but for the highly specialized and vulnerable plants very far north, the loss of sea ice could slow the arrival of invasive species that threaten the natives.
The minimum summer sea ice extent since 1979 has declined by about 87,000 square kilometers per year, equivalent to an area more than three times the size of New Jersey disappearing annually, as Post has put it. The September 2016 sea ice minimum didn’t break a record, as some had expected it might. It tied for second worst, behind the 2012 minimum, and roughly equaled the 2007 minimum. 2016 did set a new record low for winter Arctic ice extent (SN Online: 3/28/16). Sea ice changes reverberate through the ecosystem. Ice melting cues the springtime phytoplankton blooms that feed copepods and other tiny marine grazers. The grazers feed their predators and, in turn, the predators of those predators. In years when spring warming brings an early ice retreat, the phyto-plankton bloom is not a huge, rich burst. It favors smaller grazing zooplankton that don’t fuel as much of a boom in their predators, marine ecologist Martin Renner of Homer, Alaska, and colleagues reported in a paper for the Biology Letters special collection.
Tracing the effects of shrinking ice through these grazers to fish to seabirds revealed a tangled web of ups and downs and shifting foraging grounds. In the end, Renner and colleagues predict “a very different eastern Bering Sea ecosystem and fishery than we know today.” And that may be far from the only sea change in the far north.
Slight variations in the moon’s gravitational tug have hinted that kilometers-wide caverns lurk beneath the lunar surface. Like the lava tubes of Hawaii and Iceland, these structures probably formed when underground rivers of molten rock ran dry, leaving behind a cylindrical channel. On Earth, such structures max out at around 30 meters across, but the gravitational data suggest that the moon’s tubes are vastly wider.
Assessing the sturdiness of lava tubes under lunar gravity, planetary geophysicist Dave Blair of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., and colleagues estimate that the caves could remain structurally sound up to 5 kilometers across. That’s wide enough to fit the Golden Gate Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge and London Bridge end to end.
Such colossal caves will be prime real estate for lunar pioneers, the researchers report in the Jan. 15 Icarus. Lava tubes could offer protection from the extreme temperatures, harsh radiation and meteorite impacts on the surface.
Scientists investigating what keeps lungs from overinflating can quit holding their breath.
Experiments in mice have identified a protein that senses when the lungs are full of air. This protein helps regulate breathing in adult mice and gets breathing going in newborn mice, researchers report online December 21 in Nature.
If the protein plays a similar role in people — and a few studies suggest that it does — exploring its activity could help explain disorders such as sleep apnea or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. “These are extremely well done, very elegant studies,” says neonatologist Shabih Hasan of the University of Calgary in Canada, a specialist in breathing disorders in newborns. Researchers knew that feedback between the lungs and brain maintains normal breathing. But “this research give us an understanding at the cellular level,” says Hasan. “It’s a major advance.”
Called Piezo2, the protein forms channels in the membranes of nerve cells in the lungs. When the lungs stretch, the Piezo2 channels detect the distortion caused by the mechanical force of breathing and spring open, triggering the nerves to send a signal. Led by neuroscientist Ardem Patapoutian, researchers discovered that the channels send signals along three different pathways. Mice bred to lack Piezo2 in a cluster of nerve cells that send messages to the spinal cord had trouble breathing and died within 24 hours. Similarly, newborn mice missing Piezo2 channels in nerves that communicate with the brain stem via a structure called the jugular ganglion also died. Mice lacking Piezo2 in the nodose ganglion, a structure that also links to the brain stem, lived to adulthood. But their breathing was abnormal and an important safety mechanism in the lungs of these mice didn’t work. Called the Hering-Breuer reflex, it kicks in when the lungs are in danger of overinflating. When functioning properly, Piezo2’s signal prevents potentially harmful overinflation by temporarily halting breathing. Known as apnea, this cessation of breathing can be dangerous in other instances but prevents damage in this case.
“Breathing is a mechanical process,” says Patapoutian, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif. “Intuitively, you could imagine that lung stretch sensors could play an important role in regulating breathing pattern. Amazingly, however, no definitive proof for such a feedback mechanism existed.”
Previous work in mice by Patapoutian and colleagues found that Piezo2 channels play a major role in sensing touch. The channels also function in proprioception, the sense of where body parts are in relation to each other, Patapoutian and colleagues reported last year.
Two recent studies by different research teams have found that people with mutations in a Piezo2 gene have problems with touch, proprioception and, in one study, breathing. Although small, the studies suggested that investigating Piezo2 in people could shed light on breathing disorders or other problems. The protein channels might play a role in sensing the “fullness” of the stomach and bladder and perhaps other mechanical processes such as heart rate control, Patapoutian says.
Investigating Piezo2 could also help explain how newborn lungs transition from being fluid-filled to breathing air, says neuroscientist Christo Goridis of the École des Neurosciences Paris.
New research is stirring the pot about an ancient Egyptian burial practice.
Many ancient peoples, including Egyptians, buried some of their dead in ceramic pots or urns. Researchers have long thought these pot burials, which often recycled containers used for domestic purposes, were a common, make-do burial for poor children.
But at least in ancient Egypt, the practice was not limited to children or to impoverished families, according to a new analysis. Bioarchaeologist Ronika Power and Egyptologist Yann Tristant, both of Macquarie University in Sydney, reviewed published accounts of pot burials at 46 sites, most near the Nile River and dating from about 3300 B.C. to 1650 B.C. Their results appear in the December Antiquity. A little over half of the sites contained the remains of adults. For children, pot burials were less common than expected: Of 746 children, infants and fetuses interred in some type of burial container, 338 were buried in wooden coffins despite wood’s relative scarcity and cost. Another 329 were buried in pots. Most of the rest were placed in baskets or, in a few cases, containers fashioned from materials such as reeds or limestone.
In the tomb of a wealthy governor, an infant was found in a pot containing beads covered in gold foil. Other pot burials held myriad goods — gold, ivory, ostrich eggshell beads, clothing or ceramics. Bodies were either placed directly into urns, or sometimes pots were broken or cut to fit the deceased.
People deliberately chose the containers, in part for symbolic reasons, the researchers now propose. The hollow vessels, which echo the womb, may have been used to represent a rebirth into the afterlife, the scientists say.
Everybody wants more juice from their batteries. Smartphones and laptops always need recharging. Electric car drivers must carefully plan their routes to avoid being stranded far from a charging station. Anyone who struggles with a tangle of chargers every night would prefer a battery that can last for weeks or months.
For researchers who specialize in batteries, though, the drive for a better battery is less about the luxury of an always-charged iPad (though that would be nice) and more about kicking our fossil fuel habit. Given the right battery, smog-belching cars and trucks could be replaced with vehicles that run whisper-quiet on electricity alone. No gasoline engine, no emissions. Even airplanes could go electric. And the power grid could be modernized to use cheaper, greener fuels such as sunlight or wind even on days when the sun doesn’t shine bright enough or the wind doesn’t blow hard enough to meet electricity demand.
A better battery has the potential to jolt people into the future, just like the lithium-ion battery did. When they became popular in the early 1990s, lithium-ion batteries offered twice as much energy as the next best alternative. They changed the way people communicate.
“What the lithium-ion battery did to personal electronics was transformational,” says materials scientist George Crabtree, director of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. “The cell phone not only made landlines obsolete for many, but [the lithium-ion battery] put cameras and the internet into the hands of millions.” That huge leap didn’t happen overnight. “It was the sum of many incremental steps forward, and decades of work,” says Crabtree, who coordinates battery research in dozens of U.S. labs. Lithium-ion batteries have their limits, however, especially for use in the power grid and in electric vehicles. Fortunately, like their Energizer mascot, battery researchers never rest. Over the last 10 years, universities, tech companies and car manufacturers have explored hundreds of new battery technologies, reaching for an elusive and technically difficult goal: next-generation batteries that hold more energy, last longer and are cheaper, safer and easier to recharge.
A decade of incremental steps are beginning to pay off. In late 2017, scientists will introduce a handful of prototype batteries to be developed by manufacturers for potential commercialization. Some contain new ingredients — sulfur and magnesium — that help store energy more efficiently, delivering power for longer periods. Others will employ new designs. “These prototypes are proof-of-principle batteries, miniature working versions,” Crabtree says. Getting the batteries into consumer hands will take five to 10 years. Making leaps in battery technology, he says, is surprisingly hard to do.
Power struggle Batteries operate like small chemical plants. Technically, a battery is a combination of two or more “electrochemical cells” in which energy released by chemical reactions produces a flow of electrons. The greater the energy produced by the chemical reactions, the greater the electron flow. Those electrons provide a current to whatever the battery is powering — kitchen clock, smoke alarm, car engine.
To power any such device, the electrons must flow through a circuit connecting two electrodes, known as an anode and a cathode, separated by a substance called an electrolyte. At the anode, chemical oxidation reactions release electrons. At the cathode, electrons are taken up in reduction reactions. The electrolyte enables ions created by the oxidation and reduction reactions to pass back and forth between the two electrodes, completing the circuit.
Depending on the materials used for the electrodes and the electrolyte, a battery may be recharged by supplying current that drives the chemical reactions in reverse. In creating new recipes for a rechargeable electrochemical soup, though, battery researchers must beware of side reactions that can spoil everything. “There’s the chemical reaction you want — the one that stores energy and releases it,” Crabtree says. “But there are dozens of other … reactions that also take place.” Those side reactions can disable a battery, or worse, lead to a risk of catastrophic discharge. (Consider the recent fires in Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 smartphones.)
Early versions of the lithium-ion battery from the 1970s carried an anode made of pure lithium metal. Through repeated use, lithium ions were stripped off and replated onto the anode, creating fingerlike extensions that reached across to the cathode, shorting out the battery. Today’s lithium-ion batteries have an anode made of graphite (a form of carbon) so that loose lithium ions can snuggle in between sheets of carbon atoms.
Lithium-ion batteries were originally developed with small electronics in mind; they weren’t designed for storing electricity on the grid or powering electric vehicles. Electric cars need lots of power, a quick burst of energy to move from stop to start. Electric car manufacturers now bundle thousands of such batteries together to provide power for up to 200 miles before recharging, but that range still falls far short of what a tank of gas can offer. And lithium-ion batteries drain too quickly to feed long hours of demand on the grid.
Simply popping more batteries into a car or the grid isn’t the answer, Crabtree says. Stockpiling doesn’t improve the charging time or the lifetime of the battery. It’s also bulky. Carmakers have to leave drivers room for their passengers plus some trunk space. To make electric vehicles competitive with, or better than, vehicles run by internal-combustion engines, manufacturers will need low-cost, high-energy batteries that last up to 15 years. Likewise, grid batteries need to store energy for later use at low cost, and stand up to decades of use.
“There’s no one battery that’s going to meet all our needs,” says MIT materials scientist Yet-Ming Chiang. Batteries needed for portable devices are very different from those needed for transportation or grid-scale storage. Expect to see a variety of new battery types, each designed for a specific application. Switching to sulfur For electric vehicles, lithium-sulfur batteries are the next great hope. The cathode is made mainly of sulfur, an industrial waste product that is cheap, abundant and environmentally friendly. The anode is made of lithium metal.
During discharge, lithium ions break away from the anode and swim through the liquid electrolyte to reach the sulfur cathode. There, the ions form a covalent bond with the sulfur atoms. Each sulfur atom bonds to two lithium ions, rather than just one, doubling the number of bonds in the cathode of the battery. More chemical bonds means more stored energy, so a lithium-sulfur battery creates more juice than a lithium-ion one. That, combined with sulfur’s light weight, means that, in principle, manufacturers can pack more punch for a given amount of weight, storing four or five times as much energy per gram.
Ultimately, that upgrade could boost an electric vehicle’s range up to as much as 500 miles on a single charge. But first, researchers have to get past the short lifetime of existing lithium-sulfur batteries, which, Crabtree says, is due to a loss of lithium and sulfur in each charge-discharge cycle.
When lithium combines with sulfur, it also forms compounds called polysulfides, which quickly gum up the battery’s insides. Polysulfides form within the cathode during battery discharge, when stored energy is released. Once they dissolve in the battery’s liquid electrolyte, the polysulfides shuttle to the anode and react with it, forming a film that renders the battery useless within a few dozen cycles — or one to two months of use.
At Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., a team led by Kevin Zavadil is trying to block the formation of polysulfides in the electrolyte. The electrolyte consists of salt and a solvent, and current lithium-sulfur batteries require a large amount of electrolyte to achieve a moderate life span. Zavadil and his team are developing “lean” electrolyte mixtures less likely to dissolve the sulfur molecules that create polysulfides.
Described September 9 in ACS Energy Letters, the new electrolyte mix contains a higher-than-usual salt concentration and a “sparing” amount of solvent. The researchers also reduced the overall amount of electrolyte in the batteries. In test runs, the tweaks dropped the concentration of polysulfides by several orders of magnitude, Zavadil says. “We [also] have some ideas on how to use membranes to protect the lithium surface to prevent polysulfides from happening in the first place,” Zavadil says. The goal is to produce a working prototype of the new battery — one that can last through thousands of cycles — by the end of 2017.
At the University of Texas at Austin, materials engineer Guihua Yu, along with colleagues at Zhejiang University of Technology in Hangzhou, China, is investigating another work-around for this battery type: replacing the solid sulfur cathode with an intricate structure that encapsulates the sulfur in an array of nanotubes. Reported in the November issue of Nano Letters, the nanotubes that encase the sulfur are fashioned from manganese dioxide, a material that can attract and hold on to polysulfides. The nanotubes are coated with polypyrrole, a conductive polymer that helps boost the flow of electrons.
This approach reduces buildup and boosts overall conductivity and efficiency, Yu says. So far, with the group’s new architecture, the battery loses less than 0.07 percent of its capacity per charge and discharge cycle. After 500 cycles, the battery maintained about 65 percent of its original capacity, a great improvement over the short lifetime of current lithium-sulfur batteries. Still, for use in electric vehicles, scientists want batteries that can last through thousands of cycles, or 10 to 15 years. Scientists at Argonne are constructing another battery type: one that replaces lithium ions at the anode with magnesium. This switch could instantly boost the electrical energy released for the same volume, says Argonne materials engineer Brian Ingram, noting that a magnesium ion has a charge of +2, double that of lithium’s +1. Magnesium’s ability to produce twice the electrical current of lithium ions could allow for smaller, more energy-dense batteries, Ingram says.
Magnesium comes with its own challenge, however. Whereas lithium ions zip through a battery’s electrolyte, magnesium ions slowly trudge. A team of researchers at Argonne, Northwestern University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory shot high-energy X-rays at magnesium in various batteries and learned that the drag is due to interactions with molecules that the magnesium attracts within the electrolyte. Ingram and his group are experimenting with new materials to find a molecular recipe that reduces such drag.
Ingram’s team is trying to nudge its “highly functioning, long-lasting” prototype to 3 volts by December. Today’s typical lithium-ion battery has 3.8 to 4 volts. At 3 volts, Ingram says, the magnesium battery would pack more power than a 4-volt lithium-ion battery and “create a tremendous amount of excitement within the field.”
Going with the flow Together, transportation and the electricity grid account for about two-thirds of U.S. energy use. But today, only 10 percent of the electricity on the grid is from renewable sources, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. If wind and solar power are ever to wrestle energy production away from fossil fuels, big changes must happen in energy storage. What is needed, Crabtree says, is a battery that can store energy, and lots of it, for later use. “Though the sun shines in the middle of the afternoon, peak demand comes at sunset when people go home, turn on lights and cook dinner,” he says.
To reliably supply electricity at night or on cloudy, windless days requires a different type of battery. By design, flow batteries fit the bill. Instead of having solid electrodes, flow batteries store energy in two separate tanks filled with chemicals — one positively charged, the other negatively charged. Pumps move the liquids from the tanks into a central chamber, or “stack,” where dissolved molecules in the liquids undergo chemical reactions that store and give up energy. A membrane located in the stack keeps the positive and negative ions separated. Flow batteries can store energy for a long time and provide power as needed. Because the energy-storing liquids are kept in external tanks, the batteries are unlikely to catch fire, and can be built large or small depending on need. To store more power, use a larger tank.
So far, however, flow batteries are expensive to make and maintain, and have had limited use for providing backup power on the grid. Today’s flow batteries are packed with rare and toxic metal components, usually vanadium. With many moving parts — tanks, pumps, seals and sensors — breakdowns and leakage are common.
At MIT, Chiang and colleagues are developing flow batteries that can bypass those drawbacks. One, an hourglass flow battery, does away with the need for costly and troublesome pumps. The stack where the chemical reactions occur is in the constricted middle, with tanks at either end. Gravity allows the liquids to flow through the stack, like sand in an hourglass. A motor adjusts the battery’s angle to speed or slow the flow.
The hourglass design is like a “concept car,” Chiang says. Though the final product is likely to take a slightly different shape, the design could serve as a model for future flow batteries. Simply changing the tilt of the device could add a short infusion of power to the grid during periods of peak demand, or slowly release energy over a period of many hours to keep air conditioners and heaters running when the sun is down.
In another design, the group has replaced vanadium with sulfur, which is inexpensive and abundant. Dissolved in water (also cheap and plentiful), sulfur is circulated into and out of the battery’s stack, creating a reaction that stores or gives up energy, similar to commercial flow batteries. The group is now refining the battery, first described in 2014 in Nano Letters, aiming for higher levels of energy.
Another challenge in developing flow batteries is finding ways to keep active materials confined to their tanks. That’s the job of the battery membrane, but because the organic molecules under consideration for battery use are almost always small, they too easily slip through the membrane, reducing the battery’s lifetime and performance. Rather than change the membrane, a group led by chemist Joaquín Rodríguez-López of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign devised ways to bulk up the battery’s active materials by changing their size or configuration. The scientists linked tens to millions of active molecules together to create large, ringed structures, long strings of molecules hooked onto a polymer backbone, or suspensions of polymers containing up to a billion molecules, they reported in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in 2014.
With the oversized molecules, even “simple, inexpensive porous membranes are effective at preventing crossover,” Crabtree says. A prototype flow battery that provides low-cost power and lasts 20 to 30 years is expected to be completed in the coming year.
Getting air Looking beyond 2017, scientists envision a new generation of batteries made of low-cost, or even no-cost, materials. The lithium-air battery, still in early development, uses oxygen sucked in from the atmosphere to drive the chemical reaction that produces electricity. In the process, oxygen combines with lithium ions to form a solid compound (lithium peroxide). During charging, solid oxygen reverts back to its gaseous form.
“Lithium-air potentially offers the highest energy density possible,” says MIT materials engineer Ju Li. “You basically react lithium metal with oxygen in air, and in principle you get as much useful energy as gasoline.”
Lithium-air has problems, though. The batteries are hard to recharge, losing much of their power during the process. And the chemical reaction that powers the battery generates heat, cutting the battery’s energy-storage capacity and life span.
Using electron microscopy to study the reaction products of a lithium-air prototype, Li and his group came up with a possible solution: Keep oxygen in a solid form sealed within the battery to prevent the oxygen from forming a gas. By encasing oxygen and lithium in tiny glasslike particles, the scientists created a fully sealed battery. The new strategy, published July 25 online in Nature Energy, curbed energy loss during recharging and prevented heat buildup.
“If it works on a large scale, we would have an electrical vehicle that’s competitive with gasoline-driven cars,” Li says. Reaching that goal would be a big step toward a greener planet.
