Scientists convert waste paper into battery parts for smartphones and electric vehicles

Scientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have developed a technique to convert waste paper, from single-use packaging and bags, and cardboard boxes, into a crucial component of lithium-ion batteries.

Through a process called carbonisation which converts paper into pure carbon, the NTU researchers turned the paper's fibres into electrodes, which can be made into rechargeable batteries that power mobile phones, medical equipment, and electric vehicles.

To carbonise the paper, the team exposed the paper to high temperatures, which reduces it to pure carbon, water vapour and oils that can be used for biofuel. As carbonisation takes place in the absence of oxygen, this emits negligible amounts of carbon dioxide, and the process is a greener alternative to disposing of kraft paper through incineration, producing large amounts of greenhouse gasses.

The carbon anodes produced by the research team also demonstrated superior durability, flexibility, and electrochemical properties. Laboratory tests showed that the anodes could be charged and discharged up to 1,200 times, which is at least twice as durable as anodes in current phone batteries. The batteries that use the NTU-made anodes could also withstand more physical stress than their counterparts, absorbing crushing energy up to five times better.

The NTU-developed method also uses less energy-intensive processes and heavy metals compared to current industrial methods of manufacturing battery anodes. As the anode is worth 10 per cent to 15 per cent of the total cost of a lithium-ion battery, this latest method, which uses a low-cost waste material, is expected to also bring down the cost of manufacturing them.

The findings were published in the scientific peer-reviewed journal Additive Manufacturing in October.

Using waste paper as the raw material to produce battery anodes would also ease our reliance on conventional sources for carbon, such as carbonaceous fillers and carbon-yielding binders, which are mined and later processed with harsh chemicals and machinery.

Paper waste, which comprises disposed paper bags cardboard, newspaper, and other paper packaging, accounted for nearly a fifth of the waste generated in Singapore in 2020.

Kraft paper bags, which make up the bulk of Singapore's paper waste, were also found to have large environmental footprints compared to their counterparts made of cotton and plastic, due to their greater contribution to global warming when incinerated and the eco-toxicity potential in producing them, a separate 2020 NTU study found.

The current innovation which presents an opportunity to upcycle waste products and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, accelerating our transition towards a circular economy, green materials, and clean energy, reflects NTU's commitment to mitigate our impact on the environment, which is one of four humanity's grand challenges that the University seeks to address through its NTU 2025 strategic plan.

Assistant Professor Lai Changquan, from NTU's School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, who led the project, said: "Paper is used in many facets in our daily lives, from gift wrapping and arts and crafts, to a myriad of industrial uses, such as heavy-duty packaging, protective wrapping, and the filling of voids in construction. However, little is done to manage it when it is disposed of, besides incineration, which generates high levels of carbon emissions due to their composition. Our method to give kraft paper another lease of life, funnelling it into the growing need for devices such as electric vehicles and smartphones, would not only help cut down on carbon emissions but would also ease the reliance on mining and heavy industrial methods."

The research team has filed for a patent with NTUitive, NTU's innovation and enterprise company. They are also working towards commercialising their invention.

The recipe for greener battery parts

To produce the carbon anodes, the NTU researchers joined and laser cut several thin sheets of kraft paper to form different lattice geometries, some resembling a spikey piñata. The paper was then heated to 1200°C in a furnace without the presence of oxygen, to convert it into carbon, forming the anodes.

The NTU team attributes the anode's superior durability, flexibility, and electrochemical properties to the arrangement of the paper fibres. They said the combination of strength and mechanical toughness shown by the NTU-made anodes would allow batteries of phones, laptops and automobiles to better withstand shocks from falls and crashes.

Current lithium battery technology relies on internal carbon electrodes that gradually crack and crumble after physical shocks from being dropped, which is one of the main reasons why battery life gets shorter with time.

The researchers say that their anodes, which are hardier than current electrodes used in batteries, would help address this problem and extend the life of batteries in a wide array of uses, from electronics to electric vehicles.

Co-author of the study Mr Lim Guo Yao, a research engineer from NTU's School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, said: "Our anodes displayed a combination of strengths, such as durability, shock absorption, electrical conductivity, which are not found in current materials. These structural and functional properties demonstrate that our kraft paper-based anodes are a sustainable and scalable alternative to current carbon materials, and would find economic value in demanding, high-end, multifunctional applications, such as the nascent field of structural batteries."

Asst Prof Lai added: "Our method converts a common and ubiquitous material -- paper -- into another that is extremely durable and in high demand. We hope that our anodes will serve the world's quickly growing need for a sustainable and greener material for batteries, whose manufacturing and improper waste management have shown to have a negative impact on our environment."

Highlighting the significance of the work done by the NTU research team, Professor Juan Hinestroza from the Department of Human Centered Design of Cornell University, US, who was not involved in the research, said: "As kraft paper is produced in very large quantities and disposed likewise all over the world, I believe that the creative approach pioneered by the researchers at NTU Singapore has a great potential for impact at a global scale. Any discovery that will allow the use of waste as a raw material for high-value products like electrodes and foams is indeed a great contribution. I think that this work may open a new avenue and motivate other researchers to find pathways for the transformation of other cellulose-based substrates, such as textiles and packaging materials, which are being discarded in large quantities all over the globe."

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Virtual reality app trial shown to reduce common phobias

Results from a University of Otago, Christchurch trial suggest fresh hope for the estimated one-in-twelve people worldwide suffering from a fear of flying, needles, heights, spiders and dogs.

The trial, led by Associate Professor Cameron Lacey, from the Department of Psychological Medicine, studied phobia patients using a headset and a smartphone app treatment programme -- a combination of Virtual Reality (VR) 360-degree video exposure therapy and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT).

Participants downloaded a fully self-guided smartphone app called "oVRcome," developed by Christchurch tech entrepreneur Adam Hutchinson, aimed at treating patients with phobia and anxiety.

The app was paired with a headset to immerse participants in virtual environments to help treat their phobia.

The results from the trial, just published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, showed a 75 per cent reduction in phobia symptoms after six weeks of the treatment programme.

"The improvements they reported suggests there's great potential for the use of VR and mobile phone apps as a means of self-guided treatment for people struggling with often-crippling phobias," Associate Professor Lacey says.

"Participants demonstrated a strong acceptability of the app, highlighting its potential for delivering easily accessible, cost-effective treatment at scale, of particular use for those unable to access in-person exposure therapy to treat their phobias."

A total of 129 people took part in the six-week randomised, controlled trial, between May 2021 and December 2021, with a 12-week follow-up. Participants needed to be aged between 18-64 years, have a fear of either flying, heights, needles, spiders and dogs. They were emailed weekly questionnaires to record their progress. Those experiencing adverse events could request contact from a clinical psychologist at any stage.

"Participants experiencing all five types of phobia showed comparable improvements in the Severity Measures for Specific Phobia scale over the course of the trial. The average severity score decreased from 28/40 (moderate to severe symptoms) to 7/40 (minimal symptoms) after six weeks. There were no participant withdrawals due to intervention-related adverse events.

"The oVRcome app involves what's called "exposure therapy," a form of CBT exposing participants to their specific phobias in short bursts, to build up their tolerance to the phobia in a clinically-approved and controlled way," Associate Professor Lacey says.

"Some participants reported significant progress in overcoming their phobias after the trial period, with one feeling confident enough to now book an overseas family holiday, another lining up for a Covid vaccine and another reporting they now felt confident not only knowing there was a spider in the house but that they could possibly remove it themselves."

The app programme consisted of standard CBT components including psychoeducation, relaxation, mindfulness, cognitive techniques, exposure through VR, and a relapse prevention model. Participants were able to select their own exposure levels to their particular phobia from a large library of VR videos.

"This means the levels of exposure therapy could be tailored to an individual's needs which is a particular strength. The more traditional in-person exposure treatment for specific phobias have a notoriously high dropout rate due to discomfort, inconvenience and a lack of motivation in people seeking out fears to expose themselves to. With this VR app treatment, triallists had increased control in exposure to their fears, as well as control over when and where exposure occurs," says Associate Professor Lacey.

The researchers say this trial was novel, due to the cost-effective availability of the app and headsets and the fact that multiple phobias were tested at once. They say most comparative VR studies to date have investigated high-end VR devices which are only available in research and limited clinical settings. One Dutch study examined a low-cost VR Dutch-language program using animated imagery that demonstrated improvement in fear-of-height symptoms, however this study only examined a single type of specific phobia.

Associate Professor Lacey says public demand to take part in the trial was unprecedented, demonstrating the increasing need and desire for phobia treatment in the community.

"An estimated ten per cent of New Zealanders have been hesitant to take part in the government's COVID-19 vaccination programme due to needle phobia. This hasn't been helped by a significant shortage of psychologists. A petition to Parliament last year claimed New Zealand is 1,000 psychologists short, causing ballooning wait times nationwide, making it difficult for people to access help if needed. We need to further research and explore the use of more cost-effective, easily-accessible, home-based solutions such as this oVRcome app, to provide people with the treatment and support they need."

Read more at Science Daily

Smart technology is not making us dumber

There are plenty of negatives associated with smart technology -- tech neck, texting and driving, blue light rays -- but there is also a positive: the digital age is not making us stupid, says University of Cincinnati social/behavioral expert Anthony Chemero.

"Despite the headlines, there is no scientific evidence that shows that smartphones and digital technology harm our biological cognitive abilities," says the UC professor of philosophy and psychology who recently co-authored a paper stating such in Nature Human Behaviour.

In the paper, Chemero and colleagues at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management expound on the evolution of the digital age, explaining how smart technology supplements thinking, thus helping us to excel.

"What smartphones and digital technology seem to do instead is to change the ways in which we engage our biological cognitive abilities," Chemero says, adding "these changes are actually cognitively beneficial."

For example, he says, your smart phone knows the way to the baseball stadium so that you don't have to dig out a map or ask for directions, which frees up brain energy to think about something else. The same holds true in a professional setting: "We're not solving complex mathematical problems with pen and paper or memorizing phone numbers in 2021."

Computers, tablets and smart phones, he says, function as an auxiliary, serving as tools which are good at memorization, calculation and storing information and presenting information when you need it.

Additionally, smart technology augments decision making skills that we would be hard pressed to accomplish on our own, says the paper's lead author Lorenzo Cecutti, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. Using GPS technology on our phones, he says, can not only help us get there, but lets us choose a route based on traffic conditions. "That would be a challenging task when driving round in a new city."

Chemero adds: "You put all this technology) together with a naked human brain and you get something that's smarter...and the result is that we, supplemented by our technology, are actually capable of accomplishing much more complex tasks than we could with our un-supplemented biological abilities."

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How smartphones can help detect ecological change

Leipzig/Jena/Ilmenau. Mobile apps like Flora Incognita that allow automated identification of wild plants cannot only identify plant species, but also uncover large scale ecological patterns. These patterns are surprisingly similar to the ones derived from long-term inventory data of the German flora, even though they have been acquired over much shorter time periods and are influenced by user behaviour. This opens up new perspectives for rapid detection of biodiversity changes. These are the key results of a study led by a team of researchers from Central Germany, which has recently been published in Ecography.

With the help of Artificial Intelligence, plant species today can be classified with high accuracy. Smartphone applications leverage this technology to enable users to easily identify plant species in the field, giving laypersons access to biodiversity at their fingertips. Against the backdrop of climate change, habitat loss and land-use change, these applications may serve another use: by gathering information on the locations of identified plant species, valuable datasets are created, potentially providing researchers with information on changing environmental conditions.

But is this information reliable -- as reliable as the information provided by data collected over long time periods? A team of researchers from the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), the Remote Sensing Centre for Earth System Research (RSC4Earth) of Leipzig University (UL) and Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry (MPI-BGC) and Technical University Ilmenau wanted to find an answer to this question. The researchers analysed data collected with the mobile app Flora Incognita between 2018 and 2019 in Germany and compared it to the FlorKart database of the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN). This database contains long-term inventory data collected by over 5,000 floristic experts over a period of more than 70 years.

Mobile app uncovers macroecological patterns in Germany

The researchers report that the Flora Incognita data, collected over only two years, allowed them to uncover macroecological patterns in Germany similar to those derived from long-term inventory data of German flora. The data was therefore also a reflection of the effects of several environmental drivers on the distribution of different plant species.

However, directly comparing the two datasets revealed major differences between the Flora Incognita data and the long-term inventory data in regions with a low human population density. "Of course, how much data is collected in a region strongly depends on the number of smartphone users in that region," said last author Dr. Jana Wäldchen from MPI-BGC, one of the developers of the mobile app. Deviations in the data were therefore more pronounces in rural areas, except for well-known tourist destinations such as the Zugspitze, Germany's highest mountain, or Amrum, an island on the North Sea coast.

User behaviour also influences which plant species are recorded by the mobile app. "The plant observations carried out with the app reflect what users see and what they are interested in," said Jana Wäldchen. Common and conspicuous species were recorded more often than rare and inconspicuous species. Nonetheless, the large quantity of plant observations still allows a reconstruction of familiar biogeographical patterns. For their study, the researchers had access to more than 900,000 data entries created within the first two years after the app had been launched.

Automated species recognition bears great potential

The study shows the potential of this kind of data collection for biodiversity and environmental research, which could soon be integrated in strategies for long-term inventories. "We are convinced that automated species recognition bears much greater potential than previously thought and that it can contribute to a rapid detection of biodiversity changes," said first author Miguel Mahecha, professor at UL and iDiv Member. In the future, a growing number of users of apps like Flora Incognita could help detect and analyse ecosystem changes worldwide in real time.

The Flora Incognita mobile app was developed jointly by the research groups of Dr. Jana Wäldchen at MPI-BGC and the group of Professor Patrick Mäder at TU Ilmenau. It is the first plant identification app in Germany using deep neural networks (deep learning) in this context. Fed by thousands of plant images, that have been identified by experts, it can already identify over 4,800 plant species.

Read more at Science Daily

Body mass index, age can affect your risk for neck pain

With roughly 80% of jobs being sedentary, often requiring several hours of sitting stooped in front of a computer screen, neck pain is a growing occupational hazard. Smartphones and other devices have also caused people to bend their necks for prolonged periods. But is bad posture solely to blame?

In a recent study, researchers at Texas A&M University have found that while poor neck and head postures are indeed the primary determinants of neck pain, body mass index, age and the time of the day also influence the neck's ability to perform sustained or repeated movements.

"Neck pain is one of the leading and fastest-growing causes of disability in the world," said Xudong Zhang, professor in the Wm Michael Barnes '64 Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. "Our study has pointed to a combination of work and personal factors that strongly influence the strength and endurance of the neck over time. More importantly, since these factors have been identified, they can then be modified so that the neck is in better health and pain is avoided or deterred."

The results of the study are published online in the journal Human Factors, a flagship journal in the field of human factors and ergonomics.

According to the Global Burden of Disease Study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, neck pain is ranked as the fourth leading cause of global disability. One of the main reasons for neck pain has been attributed to lifestyle, particularly when people spend long durations of time with their necks bent forward. However, Zhang said a systematic, quantitative study has been lacking on how personal factors, such as sex, weight, age and work-related habits, can affect neck strength and endurance.

For their experiments, Zhang and his team recruited 20 adult men and 20 adult women with no previous neck-related issues to perform controlled head-neck exertions in a laboratory setting. Instead of asking the participants to hold a specific neck posture for a long time, similar to what might happen at a workplace, they performed "sustained-till exhaustion" head-neck exertions.

"In the laboratory, conducting experiments where subjects do long tasks with their neck can take several hours of data collection, which is not very practical for the experimenters and, of course, the participants in our study," said Zhang. "To solve this problem, our experiments were strategically designed to mimic workplace neck strains but in a shorter period of time."

In these exercises, subjects were seated and asked to put on an augmented helmet that allowed them to exert measurable force by the neck. Then, the researchers asked them to either keep their necks straight or maintain their neck tilted in a forward or backward position. In this position, a force was applied to their head and neck on an adjustable frame. This exertion was either to their maximum capacity of half of it. Before testing, the researchers noted their subjects' age, body mass index and the time of day.

When Zhang and his team analyzed their data, they found that, as expected, work-related factors like head/neck posture play a very important role in determining both neck strength and endurance. But they also observed that while there was no significant difference between male and female subjects' in neck endurance, body mass index was a significant predictor of neck endurance. Also, to their surprise, the time of day affected the neck's ability to sustain an exertion without fatigue.

"It is intuitive to think that over the course of the day, our necks get more tired since we use it more," Zhang said. "But roughly half of our participants were tested in the morning and the remaining in the afternoon. Also, some of the participants had day jobs and some worked the night shift. Despite this, we consistently found the time-of-day effect on neck endurance."

The researchers said their database of neck strength and endurance is also necessary for building advanced musculoskeletal biomechanical models of the neck, which can then be used to, for example, tease apart specific neck muscles that are more vulnerable to injury.

"Looking ahead, we might have the data to begin evaluating if patients recovering from neck injuries are ready to return to work based on whether their neck strength and endurance are within the norm," Zhang said. "Also, engineers and designers could utilize our data to make wearable devices, like helmets, that are more ergonomic and less stressful on the neck."

Other contributors to this work include Suman Chowdhury from Texas Tech University, and Yu Zhou, Bocheng Wan and Curran Reddy from the industrial and systems engineering department.

Read more at Science Daily

Virtual reality helping to treat fear of heights

 Researchers from the University of Basel have developed a virtual reality app for smartphones to reduce fear of heights. Now, they have conducted a clinical trial to study its efficacy. Trial participants who spent a total of four hours training with the app at home showed an improvement in their ability to handle real height situations.

Fear of heights is a widespread phenomenon. Approximately 5% of the general population experiences a debilitating level of discomfort in height situations. However, the people affected rarely take advantage of the available treatment options, such as exposure therapy, which involves putting the person in the anxiety-causing situation under the guidance of a professional. On the one hand, people are reluctant to confront their fear of heights. On the other hand, it can be difficult to reproduce the right kinds of height situations in a therapy setting.

This motivated the interdisciplinary research team led by Professor Dominique de Quervain to develop a smartphone-based virtual reality exposure therapy app called Easyheights. The app uses 360° images of real locations, which the researchers captured using a drone. People can use the app on their own smartphones together with a special virtual reality headset.

Gradually increasing the height

During the virtual experience, the user stands on a platform that is initially one meter above the ground. After allowing acclimatization to the situation for a certain interval, the platform automatically rises. In this way, the perceived distance above the ground increases slowly but steadily without an increase in the person's level of fear.

The research team studied the efficacy of this approach in a randomized, controlled trial and published the results in the journal NPJ Digital Medicine. Fifty trial participants with a fear of heights either completed a four-hour height training program (one 60-minute session and six 30-minute sessions over the course of two weeks) using virtual reality, or were assigned to the control group, which did not complete these training sessions.

Before and after the training phase -- or the same period of time without training -- the trial participants ascended the Uetliberg lookout tower near Zurich as far as their fear of heights allowed them. The researchers recorded the height level reached by the participants along with their subjective fear level at each level of the tower. At the end of the trial, the researchers evaluated the results from 22 subjects who completed the Easyheights training and 25 from the control group.

The group that completed the training with the app exhibited less fear on the tower and was able to ascend further towards the top than they could before completing the training. The control group exhibited no positive changes. The efficacy of the Easyheights training proved comparable to that of conventional exposure therapy.

Therapy in your own living room

Researchers have already been studying the use of virtual reality for treating fear of heights for more than two decades. "What is new, however, is that smartphones can be used to produce the virtual scenarios that previously required a technically complicated type of treatment, and this makes it much more accessible," explains Dr. Dorothée Bentz, lead author of the study.

The results from the study suggest that the repeated use of a smartphone-based virtual reality exposure therapy can greatly improve the behavior and subjective state of well-being in height situations. People who suffer from a mild fear of heights will soon be able to download the free app from major app stores and complete training sessions on their own. However, the researchers recommend that people who suffer from a serious fear of heights only use the app with the supervision of a professional.

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Smartphones can tell when you're drunk by analyzing your walk

 Your smartphone can tell when you've had too much to drink by detecting changes in the way you walk, according to a new study published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

Having real-time information about alcohol intoxication could be important for helping people reduce alcohol consumption, preventing drinking and driving or alerting a sponsor for someone in treatment, according to lead researcher Brian Suffoletto, M.D., who was with the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine when the research was conducted and is now with Stanford University School of Medicine's Department of Emergency Medicine.

"We have powerful sensors we carry around with us wherever we go," Suffoletto says. "We need to learn how to use them to best serve public health."

But for Suffoletto, this research is much more than academic. "I lost a close friend to a drinking and driving crash in college," he says. "And as an emergency physician, I have taken care of scores of adults with injuries related to acute alcohol intoxication. Because of this, I have dedicated the past 10 years to testing digital interventions to prevent deaths and injury related to excessive alcohol consumption."

For the study, Suffoletto and colleagues recruited 22 adults ages 21 to 43. Volunteers came to a lab and received a mixed drink with enough vodka to produce a breath alcohol concentration of .20 percent. They had one hour to finish the alcohol.

Then hourly for seven hours, participants had their breath alcohol concentration analyzed and performed a walking task. For this task, researchers placed a smartphone on each participant's lower back, secured with an elastic belt. Participants walked a straight line for 10 steps, turned around, and walked back 10 steps.

The smartphones measured acceleration and mediolateral (side to side), vertical (up and down) and anteroposterior (forward and backward) movements while the participants walked.

About 90 percent of the time, the researchers were able to use changes in gait to identify when participants' breath alcohol concentration exceeded .08 percent, the legal limit for driving in the United States.

"This controlled lab study shows that our phones can be useful to identify 'signatures' of functional impairments related to alcohol," Suffoletto says.

Although placing the smartphone on the lower back does not reflect how people carry their cell phones in real life, the research group plans to conduct additional research while people carry phones in their hands and in their pockets.

And although it was a small investigation, the researchers write that this is a "proof-of-concept study" that "provides a foundation for future research on using smartphones to remotely detect alcohol-related impairments."

"In 5 years, I would like to imagine a world in which if people go out with friends and drink at risky levels," Suffoletto says, "they get an alert at the first sign of impairment and are sent strategies to help them stop drinking and protect them from high-risk events like driving, interpersonal violence and unprotected sexual encounters."

Read more at Science Daily

Why smartphones are digital truth serum

Researchers from University of Pennsylvania published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that explains that the device people use to communicate can affect the extent to which they are willing to disclose intimate or personal information about themselves.

The study forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing is titled "Full Disclosure: How Smartphones Enhance Consumer Self-disclosure" and is authored by Shiri Melumad and Robert Meyer.

Do smartphones alter what people are willing to disclose about themselves to others? A new study in the Journal of Marketing suggests that they might. The research indicates that people are more willing to reveal personal information about themselves online using their smartphones compared to desktop computers. For example, Tweets and reviews composed on smartphones are more likely to be written from the perspective of the first person, to disclose negative emotions, and to discuss the writer's private family and personal friends. Likewise, when consumers receive an online ad that requests personal information (such as phone number and income), they are more likely to provide it when the request is received on their smartphone compared to their desktop or laptop computer.

Why do smartphones have this effect on behavior? Melumad explains that "Writing on one's smartphone often lowers the barriers to revealing certain types of sensitive information for two reasons; one stemming from the unique form characteristics of phones and the second from the emotional associations that consumers tend to hold with their device." First, one of the most distinguishing features of phones is the small size; something that makes viewing and creating content generally more difficult compared with desktop computers. Because of this difficulty, when writing or responding on a smartphone, a person tends to narrowly focus on completing the task and become less cognizant of external factors that would normally inhibit self-disclosure, such as concerns about what others would do with the information.?Smartphone users know this effect well -- when using their phones in public places, they often fixate so intently on its content that they become oblivious to what is going on around them.

The second reason people tend to be more self-disclosing on their phones lies in the feelings of comfort and familiarity people associate with their phones. Melumad adds, "Because our smartphones are with us all of the time and perform so many vital functions in our lives, they often serve as 'adult pacifiers' that bring feelings of comfort to their owners." The downstream effect of those feelings shows itself when people are more willing to disclose feelings to a close friend compared to a stranger or open up to a therapist in a comfortable rather than uncomfortable setting. As Meyer says, "Similarly, when writing on our phones, we tend to feel that we are in a comfortable 'safe zone.' As a consequence, we are more willing to open up about ourselves."

The data to support these ideas is far-ranging and includes analyses of thousands of social media posts and online reviews, responses to web ads, and controlled laboratory studies.?For example, initial evidence comes from analyses of the depth of self-disclosure?revealed in 369,161 Tweets and 10,185 restaurant reviews posted on TripAdvisor.com, with some posted on PCs and some on smartphones.? Using both automated natural-language processing tools and human judgements of self-disclosure, the researchers find robust evidence that smartphone-generated content is indeed more self-disclosing. Perhaps even more compelling is evidence from an analysis of 19,962 "call to action" web ads, where consumers are asked to provide private information.

Consistent with the tendency for smartphones to facilitate greater self-disclosure, compliance was systematically higher for ads targeted at smartphones versus PCs.

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