This year marks the 40th LSPC conference, and organizers put out a call to see who had attended every single one. Everett Gibson was a 28-year-old freshly minted PhD when he took a job at the Johnson Space Center in 1969, hoping to find water in the very first moon rocks from Apollo 11. At the first LPSC in the spring of 1970, in the long-since-disappeared Albert Thomas Convention Center, he had been working on the rocks for less than a year. Over a hundred teams worldwide had been given rocks to analyse, and the rules were simple. "Each team had to prepare a manuscript for LPSC, and we could not talk to other scientific groups before the meeting," says Gibson. "The world's press were there. Everybody came."
But not everyone came to this year's photo shoot: 40-year veterans Peter Schultz, Jim Head and Larry Taylor were at this year's meeting, but missing. In the picture, sitting in the bottom row, from left to right, is: Everett Gibson, Don Bogard and Gary Lofgren. Standing from left to right are Dmitri Papanastassiou, Don Burnett, Bob Clayton, Larry Nyquist, and Dominic Noto. Since the beginning, Noto has operated a limousine service for the conference, shuttling scientists to and from hotels and airports. He was offered an honorary spot in the photo. "I still come out here and enjoy driving with them," he says.
That's it for me this year, since I have to catch a flight in the morning. I had lots more I was hoping to highlight, but I ran out of time. Hope to see you all next year.

Posted by Eric Hand on March 26, 2009
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Up at the main Nature News site, I have a new Q&A with Steve Squyres, the newly selected chair of the next solar system decadal survey.

Posted by Eric Hand on March 26, 2009
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A graduate student on my shuttle bus to the conference center tipped me off to a couple of really cool abstracts, presented on Tuesday and tomorrow. I was all set to push for a story about them. But then a) the authors didn't want to talk to me about it, because they're hoping the work will make a splash in a journal-which-will-not-be-named, and b) I realized that my eagle-eyed editor had, like MRO, already spotted the work, and its novelty, when the authors were presenting it at AGU in December.

But the gist of the work is worth repeating: members of the MRO HiRise team are using fresh impact craters as probes of the subsurface, and are finding ice farther south than anyone has thought possible. Pictured here are the two blue pools of ice exposed after small impacts last summer excavated craters five or six metres across and about 70 centimetres deep. (Little impacts like this happen quite often in Mars' thin atmosphere.)

The authors watched the ice sublimate away over subsequent weeks, and used calculations from that to show that this ice is solid and nearly pure, not just a little bit of pore ice mixed in with the soil. And since these craters lie around 45 degrees north, it means that the subsurface ice that Mars Odyssey spotted (providing the raison d'etre for Phoenix) extends further south than previously thought. And it would support a global atmospheric water content that's higher than what's currently measured -- a sign that subsurface ice on Mars might be in global retreat.

But mostly I just love the idea of using asteroid impacts as a natural, experimental probe. You can spend half a billion dollars to send a robot near Mars' north pole to scoop away soil and expose a trench of ice. Or you can wait for asteroid impacts to do the scooping and trenching for you. Of course, you need to have spent $720 million on MRO, the equivalent of a martian spy satellite.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Posted by Eric Hand on March 26, 2009
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I have a new story up on the main Nature News site that tries to piece together the growing evidence for an ice volcano at Hotei Arcus, a region of Titan pictured here in an artist's illustration. Bob Nelson and Randy Kirk were already onto Hotei at AGU in December, but they hadn't yet processed everything from two close Cassini flybys on November 19 and December 5. The new data have allowed them a better grasp of the shape of the landscape, which looks volcanic, and Nelson is making the bold claim that, as the region gets brighter, a spectral signature for ammonia (a likely "lava" ingredient) also grows.
Image: JPL/NASA

Posted by Eric Hand on March 26, 2009
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The Chandrayaan-1 folks had a session yesterday, and people streamed into the room to see what Paul Spudis had to say about ice on the moon. Spudis is an LPI scientist leading the mini-SAR radar instrument on Chandrayaan, which is a prelude to a bigger radar instrument on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which will launch in May. Both instruments will search for radar reflections, consistent with ice, in the permanently shadowed craters of the moon's poles; Spudis has been heavily involved in this search for years.
A quick review of history (Spudis has a nice review, colored by his perspective, here): In the 1990s, the Clementine mission got everyone excited by a strange double-bouncing radar reflection from inside some polar craters. Spudis calls this double reflection "CPR" for circular polarization ratio. Blocks of ice -- or rough regolith -- can cause this change in the polarity of the radar signal.
A few years later, Lunar Prospector brought both good and bad news: it detected an excess of hydrogen atoms -- consistent with water in the regolith (shown in the image here). But only at the level of a few percent, which meant that it was uncertain whether it could represent microscopic bits of water in the pores of the soil and rock, or actual chunks of water ice.
And then in a series of papers over the last decade, people like Don Campbell, using ground based radars like Arecibo, weighed in and cast doubt on the Clementine interpretation.
But where Arecibo can only see along the rims of the polar craters, Chandrayaan can look straight down in. Spudis was very coy about what mini-SAR had seen in its first few months of its operations. But he tantalized the crowd with maps of a few small, young-ish polar craters that had high CPR signals inside the rim, but not outside. Normally, you expect the CPR signal to be high both inside and outside the rough fringe of the impact crater. He didn't say if the anomalous result could signal ice. "I don't want to speculate on what we're seeing until we've got these numbers pinned down." Campbell, listening intently in the audience, was also intrigued. "I think it's very interesting, very nice looking data," he says. "But we need to wait and see."
Image: NASA

Posted by Eric Hand on March 25, 2009
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Steve Squyres, principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rovers, has been named the chair of the steering committee for the upcoming planetary science decadal survey, according to David Smith of the National Academies' Space Studies Board. Squyres, of Cornell University, will address LPSC attendees at 12:15 pm on Wednesday.
The solar system decadal survey is like its bigger sibling the astrophysics decadal survey, the latest incarnation of which began last year under the supervision of Stanford University's Roger Blandford. Both are designed to corral and collate the desires of scientists and put them into a prioritized wish-list that agencies and the US Congress then can use to justify their spending.
The last planetary decadal was led by Michael Belton of Belton Space Exploration Initiatives, and was completed in 2003. There will likely be more scrutiny of costs; the two highest priority big missions from the last decadal were a Europa Explorer mission and a Mars Sample Return, missions that are unlikely to happen next decade. The $2 billion Mars Science Laboratory was listed as a 'medium' sized mission to be performed for less than $650 million.
Squyres, who has run one of the most successful missions in NASA history (and one much beloved by the public), ought to be a popular choice. Even the non-Mars people who will complain about a supposed bias for Mars should be consoled by his NASA bio, which describes his past involvement in the Magellan mission to Venus, the Cassini mission to Saturn, and the NEAR mission to the asteroid Eros.
Image: NASA

Posted by Eric Hand on March 25, 2009
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The man in the moon always presents us with the same mugshot, because the Earth's tides have locked the moon's spin to ours. But in a talk yesterday, Mark Wieczorek pointed out that not only did it not always have to be this way, but also that there is some evidence that the moon actually did swap its Earth-facing side at least once in the ancient past.
The work builds on a theoretical result in the 1970s from the University of Arizona's Jay Melosh, who showed that there were two equally stable ways in which the face of the moon could freeze toward Earth: the near side, and the far side. A glancing blow from a moderately big asteroid would be enough to do the job. Wieczorek, of the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, now shows that if that was the case, there would be a slight preponderance of big impacts on the moon's leading edge (marked 'apex' in the image here), since its orbiting velocity would be added to, rather than subtracted from, the impacting object. Lo and behold, he finds, the oldest impacts cluster around the moon's trailing face -- implying a flip-flop. "It's probably happened several times," he says. Most basin impacts would be big enough for the great switcheroo, but based on chronology, Wieczorek suggests that Smythii would be a likely candidate.
He says the process of a face switch could even start and stop temporary lunar dynamos -- which would be an interesting new mechanism for imprinting magnetic orientations onto lunar rocks.
Melosh was pleased that someone followed up on his theoretical idea, and says it needs to be tested on many of the Jovian and Saturnian satellites. "This suggests that this could be a common process with the other tidally locked satellites," he says.
Image: Wieczorek

Posted by Eric Hand on March 25, 2009
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With all the fierce debate over sending a NASA flagship mission to Europa or Titan, it's easy to forget that there are other communities waiting in line. Mark Bullock, of Southwest Research Institute, gave a talk describing the results of a major science and technology definition exercise for a future flagship mission to Venus. Given $4 billion to design a mission to be launched by 2025, the team had to figure out the best way to answer the most important science questions (like, does Venus have active tectonics and volcanism?) with technology that's not too far off. The team settled on a particular architecture: an orbiter, two balloons that would last about a month swimming through sulfuric acid clouds, and two landers that would survive a few hours at the lead-melting surface. Here's an artist's impression of the lander after those few hours. Venus is not a forgiving place.
Image: Tibor Balint, JPL

Posted by Eric Hand on March 24, 2009
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One more update to the Late Heavy Bombardment story, then I'll shut up about it. I started that story with a discussion of Dhofar 961, a lunar meteorite that many think is the only found meteorite to have been chipped off of the South Pole Aitken Basin, the biggest and oldest basin on the moon, and the one that, once dated, should mark the beginning of the Late Heavy Bombardment. (Statistically, this is long overdue: There are more than 60 lunar meteorites, and South Pole Aitken covers almost 15% of the lunar surface. If meteorites fall from the moon to Earth randomly, then geologists should have around 10 from South Pole Aitken.)
Now, Brad Joliff, of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, says he's even more sure it hails from the hole at the bottom of the moon. "We've tightened the argument by using more of the geochemistry that's available."
He used gamma-ray spectrometry data from Lunar Prospector for six main elements that had been tallied for each of hundreds of 5-degree squares on the moon. Comparing Dhofar 961's composition to each of the lunar squares, Joliff found that 9 out of the top 10 possible origins all lie within South Pole Aitken Basin. Next step: doing the painstaking radioisotopic dating work on miniature cores from the Dhofar sample.

Posted by Eric Hand on March 24, 2009
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Last year, I wrote a feature story about the Late Heavy Bombardment, the time, roughly 3.9 billion ago, when the young bodies of the inner solar system were subjected to a beating by asteroids flung in from the outer solar system. The story was partly triggered by an abstract presented here last year: Herb Frey's report that, using topographic data, he could identify some 92 likely impact basins bigger than 300 kilometres across -- twice as many as contained in the canonical database. That meant that the moon -- the 'record plate' for the bombardment, since the relic impact craters and basins are preserved better there than elsewhere -- was hit harder than most thought. And the work somehow made me realize just how hellish the Earth was during that epoch -- probably molten, oceans evaporated, asteroids the size of dinosaur killers casually striking the Earth every few decades or so.
And then in a talk today, Frey, of Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said that even that was lower bound. By using a crust thickness model, and identifying circular areas where the crust is thin, he can identify 50 more big impact basins unrecognized by topographic alone. That brings the number of basins greater than 300 kilometres up to about 140, he says, three times the standard number. "These should always be considered minimum numbers from now on," he said.
image: Frey, GSFC

Posted by Eric Hand on March 24, 2009
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Hello folks, welcome to the 40th anniversary Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, still in Houston, Texas, but on the other side of town (which, in Houston terms, means a heckuva long way). The traditional home of LPSC, a conference center in League City, near the Lunar and Planetary Institute and Johnson Space Center, was getting too tight for the burgeoning ranks of planetary scientists. But organizers wanted to keep the traditional roots of the conference in Houston. So they moved to a conference center in The Woodlands, a master-planned, mixed-use development done in the 1970s by astrophysics-loving billionaire George Mitchell. It's about 30 miles north of downtown Houston, and about 60 miles north of League City. I was hoping for a site about 600 miles south of League City called Cancun. Anyways, the show here at LPSC looks good -- organizers say 1,144 people of an expected 1,495 registrants have already shown up. Stay tuned -- I'll be blogging all week.

Posted by Eric Hand on March 23, 2009
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Well things are winding up, and I’m exhausted. It’s been a fascinating meeting, and I hope that you’ve enjoyed our blog! See you around, like a doughnut.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on March 20, 2009
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The meeting is wrapping up, and I’m getting ready to pack up here in Pittsburgh, but not before getting myself to a talk by Andrew Hammond a vice president at MagiQ Technologies. MagiQ is in the business of quantum key distribution, a process that uses quantum entanglement to ensure the secrecy of encrypted data.

This was all very academic when I wrote about it just a few years ago, but what was evident in Hammond’s talk is just how practical it’s becoming. According to Hammond, MagiQ’s system is now capable of refreshing a secure key at a rate of once a second. Considering that involves entangling two photons, sending one of them along a piece of optical fibre, and reading them both out when it arrives, that’s pretty darn impressive. And Hammond says there technology is constantly improving: they’re even working towards developing a PCI card that could fit inside a desktop computer.

The economic downturn has been bad for business, he admitted (banks thought to be among MagiQ’s relatively short list of highly confidential clients). But, he says, that parts of the federal government are now deploying their systems on a large scale. Assuming the economic downturn doesn’t turn into a meltdown, it sounds like quantum cryptography is here to stay.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on March 20, 2009
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As I was zipping back and forth between sessions, I kept passing the APS’s legislative booth, a row of computers where physicists could sit down to write their members of congress. In past years, the letters have pleaded for better funding for the physical sciences, which rarely receive big spending boosts.

But this year things are different. Stimulus is the buzzword and the Treasury’s purse is wide open. For example, the US Department of Energy‘s office of science is receiving a 20% increase to it‘s US$4 billion dollar budget, and that‘s before the additional money contained in the US$787 stimulus package. Obama’s 2010 budget, unveiled earlier this month, is also promising substantial increases.

I asked Brian Mosley (right), a legislative assistant for the APS, what they could possibly want after such a bumper year. “Nothing’s guaranteed,” Mosley says nervously. The stimulus money is “a one shot thing,” and as the 2010 budget winds its way through congress, “there will be a lot of competing interests.” Physicists will need to make the case that what’s good for them is good for the economy.

They’ve done a pretty decent job of getting there voice heard this week: Mosley tells me that 1434 of the 7500 physicists at the meeting have written their legislators. Given that probably around half or more of the people here aren’t US citizens, that’s an impressive turnout.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on March 20, 2009
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posted on behalf of Ed Gerstner

One of the advantages of being just one editor in an editorial team is that when something comes along that you just don't get, you can always try to pass responsibility for handling submissions on that topic to someone else. For me, supersolids was one of those things. They're fluids, superfluids in fact, but they have characteristics of a solid. What?!? Try as I might, I couldn't get my head around it.

But when I picked up a buzz about new evidence of supersolidity in an entirely new system, I figured it was time to push through this particular mental block.

The new results come from Dan Stamper-Kurn at UC Berkeley, who works on Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) of ultracold gases. The atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate don't exist at well defined positions like the atoms in a solid crystal. Each and every atom in a BEC spreads itself over the entire volume of the condensate, which can be tens of micrometres wide and hundreds of micrometres long. In the profoundest sense, a BEC has no atomic structure — not even the amorphous structure of the atoms that jostle about in a conventional liquid. This is one of the things that puts the 'super' in a superfluid.

And yet when Stamper-Kurn's group look at variations in the magnetic polarization of a trapped ultracold quantum gas of rubidium atoms (by shining light through it), they see sees a handful of microscopic blobs that order themselves around each other like the beginnings of a crystal (see the figure 2 of their preprint). It's not a typical crystal of course, the blobs are not atoms or groups of atoms forming in localized clusters in the gas — the density of the gas remains smooth and homogeneous. But its magnetic behaviour makes it look like a crystal. And crystalization is the signature of a solid.

And it's as simple as that. A supersolid is a thing that has the properties of both a superfluid — in this case a quantum gas that has no material structure — and a solid — in this case crystalline order amongst its magnetic domains.

What does this all mean? I'll tell you. I don't know. But finally I can see what it looks like.

Ed Gerstner

image: arXiv:0901.3800v1

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on March 19, 2009
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So I woke up this morning to find an e-mail from David Singh that makes iron pnictides compounds even more interesting. Apparently, last year, Hsu et al. replaced arsenic with selenium and found that their new compound could superconduct at 8K. Now Singh tells me that other groups are reporting temperatures of up to 37K at high pressures for some FeSe compounds (there's plenty more on arXiv, so don't take that link as a conclusive lit search). Se compounds are chalcogenides, so he thinks they can’t rightly be called iron pnictides anymore.

Iron-based superconductors is a little bland. Anybody got a better name?

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on March 19, 2009
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Pretty much anything with iron pnictides in the title is guaranteed to draw a crowd at this year’s meeting. I snapped this picture at a random session this morning, but others have been so rammed that it’s been hard to get in the door. Iron pnictides are the hottest new superconductor, so it’s not surprising that they’re getting a lot of attention. But I’ve been to a few of these talks, and I’m going to be frank--if you’re not an expert it’s very hard to follow. And I know what you’re thinking (particularly if you’re one of my editors): This guy’s a senior reporter with Nature and you’re telling me he can’t understand this stuff?

Well before you get on my case, it turns out I’m in good company. At a reception last night I sat down with David Singh, a theorist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and he told me that nobody really understands the pnictides. We’ve published a few papers recently suggesting that, unlike the cuprates (the other main class of high-temperature superconductors) pnictides seem to facilitate electron flow in three dimensions. But there’s still a lot of questions about what induces this superconductivity. “It’s new, it’s different and people don’t understand it,” Singh says.

So WTF? What’s all the excitement at this meeting about? Well Singh tells me that there’s a couple of things worth noting. First, people are synthesizing better quality pnictide samples. In particular, they’ve got single crystal samples that are of very high purity and thus yield better data. The second thing that’s happening is that groups are synthesizing a bunch of different compounds and checking them out. I sat in on a talk by Hai-Hu Wen of the National Laboratory for Superconductivity in Beijing, where he discussed the latest results for pnictide compounds that use iridium, rhodium and cobalt to name a few.

These compounds all superconduct in a similar range of temperatures, so there’s no big breakthrough as yet. But Singh says that they’ll help us to better understand what’s going on, and you never know, there could be a surprise. The main point, he says, is that after decades of working on just the cuprates, the community now has another high-temperature model to work with. “Nature has given us two different routes to high-Tc,” he says.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on March 18, 2009
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I just got out of a pretty cool talk about filtering water with carbon nanotubes. Apparently because the walls of the tubes are so smooth, water molecules can flow super fast through them. On top of that, the rims of the tubes are charged and can therefore reject unwanted ions.

Olgica Bakajin of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had some impressive results on display. She fashioned crude filters by growing carbon nanotubes on a silicon surface. She embedded the tubes in silicon nitride and shaved down the compound until a few of the tubes' tops were open. As the image on the right reveals, it’s not the prettiest technique (only those tubes in yellow are actually open). But it works! Her filter allows lots of water through and rejects ions at rates compatible with commercial products.

The immediate application would be for water softening, a process by which ions are removed from water in order to prevent crusty build-up (as an American living in the UK I can attest that there’s plenty of room for improvement on that front). The good thing about the tubes is that they would be higher-throughput and thus more energy efficient than commercial products. And Bakajin tells me that if they can get the diameter a little smaller, they might even be able to desalinate seawater...
credit: Y. Wang/LLNL

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on March 18, 2009
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Not many of the rules of physics are actually set in stone, but the diffraction limit is one of them. In imaging terms, the limit determines the smallest discernable feature you can make out through a microscope. It’s etched on this memorial to the 19th century German physicist Ernst Abbe, located in Jena (right).

But as the Bible proves, rules set in stone are made for breaking, and yesterday we heard from two clever physicists who’d beaten the diffraction limit. W.E. Moerner of Stanford University in California looked at fluorescing proteins in cells with a very dim light. Each cell gave off a little pinprick which could then be pinpointed using computer software, and in this way, Moerner could perform in situ imaging of individual proteins. Stefan Hell of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Gottingen had another scheme: He used two superimposed beams of light to make sure that only the protein directly under his microscope lit up. Both of these methods were able to image molecules just nanometers in size.

Of course, they’re not the only ones--there are plenty of non-optical systems that can resolve nanometer scale features (scanning-tunneling microscopes for example). But the advantage of these systems is that they can provide in situ images of biological molecules. It’s all sexy enough that our sister pub, Nature Methods, named these and related techniques as its method of the year. Check out their cool video to learn more:

Image: S. Hell

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on March 18, 2009
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It’s not really the sort of thing that you’d expect to find at a meeting which is mainly about materials, but I heard an interesting talk about recreating black hole jets in the laboratory today. For those unfamiliar with what I‘m talking about, swirling material around the top of a black hole often gets ejected in a long narrow stream. The process is complex and guided largely by the behavior of the hot, ionized gas in the jet, known as plasma.

Paul Bellan of Caltech in Pasadena, California wanted to get a better idea of how it all worked, so he built his own (right). Bellan’s black hole isn’t a hole at all: it’s two circular metal plates, one inside the other. By putting an enormous voltage difference across the plates, he can ionize gas above their surface and, albeit briefly, recreate the giant jets of black holes. He’s used his experiments to model how magnetic fields create giant jets. His conclusion? “It’s kind of like squeezing a toothpaste tube.”

Credit: P. Bellan

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on March 17, 2009
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As I mentioned earlier, you can find just about anything at the March meeting. And yesterday I found out why the tops of your feet get soaked if you’re walking across even a thin layer of water (in say, a wet parking lot). Jake Fontana of Kent State University has studied the problem in detail, using a high speed camera. With each step, a plume of water is flung from the underside of the shoe to the top of the foot. By Fontana’s calculations about 250 cubic millimeters land on your shoe with each step.

It may not sound like much, but over the course of a kilometer, that means your shoe gets half-a-liter of water dumped on it. Some studies just beg the question why? So I asked. “It’s just something that bugged us,” replied Fontana.

credit: J. Fontana

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on March 17, 2009
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Every session that’s got something to do with either solar cells or batteries is jammed packed, and it’s not hard to imagine why: The US Department of Energy (DOE) is going to be throwing a lot of money at renewable energy in the weeks and months to come.

At a press conference yesterday, we got a little update on various battery technologies that could have a big impact in the not-too-distant future. First up was Mohit Singh of SEEO, Inc. and his former supervisor Nitash Balsara of the University of California at Berkeley. SEEO is working on replacing the liquid electrolyte that is used to transport lithium ions in many batteries with more rigid polymers. These dry batteries would have some important advantages over what’s in your laptop. First is safety, the rigid polymers are less volatile than their liquid brethren, and so they are less likely to overheat and catch fire. Additionally, they would not degrade over time, meaning that your computer battery could keep its charge over years of use. Finally, they would allow batteries to operate at higher voltages, and thus higher charges.

The second speaker was Hiroyuki Nishide, of Waseda University in Tokyo. He updated us on advances in a plastic battery that could store charge in organic molecules. This can be used to create lightweight flexible batteries that could store energy in more imaginative ways than our current generation of batteries (The plastic shell of your laptop, for example, could work as the battery). Additionally, these batteries, like the one we reported on last week, are also able to charge and discharge in seconds.

Like a lot of recent advances in batteries, neither of these technologies are quite ready for prime time. Singh’s cells still require ultra long charging times to fill up with juice, and Nishide’s polymers don’t have the energy density needed to be used commercially. But they’re yet another sign that the battery business is booming.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on March 17, 2009
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As anyone who spends a day at an APS conference can tell you, physics is a global affair. I’ve heard talks by Koreans, Japanese, Germans, Australians and Americans today (among others). But one region which is consistently underrepresented at the APS is Africa.

I dropped in on a session about physics in Africa and heard a case study: Senegal. Ndeye Arame Boye-Faye, a physicist at the University Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar laid out the stats for physics in the country, and it became immediately clear that the problem (as is so often is the case) comes down to money. Senegal’s GDP is a meager US$13.9 billion, and of that just .05% (around US$7 million) goes to research. The nation’s main grants system, known as Fonds d’Impulsion de la Recherché Scientifique et Technique (FIRST), doles out US$700,000 in grants each year. That’s right, $700,000 for the entire country--there are single labs in the West that can suck up a grant that size.

Boye-Faye was quite low-key about it all: “You can see that it’s not a very big budget,” she said modestly. She hopes that the country can get a little help from France and other developed nations to boost its research efforts.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on March 16, 2009
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Greetings from the American Physical Society's March Meeting. This year it's being held in Pittsburgh, home to Andy Warhol, and for this week, around 7,500 physicists.

This meeting is an unwieldy beast. Researchers in fields from superconductors, to nanotech, to biophysics are all here talking about their work. There's even a talk on watching paint dry, and a session on crumpling things into balls (which actually looks pretty interesting).

Stay tuned...

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on March 16, 2009
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