Novel hybrid catalyst to split water discovered

Screenshot of video showing hybrid catalyst for water splitting (see video at: https://youtu.be/nkouqCFaqAk).

Researchers from the University of Houston and the California Institute of Technology have reported an inexpensive hybrid catalyst capable of splitting water to produce hydrogen, suitable for large-scale commercialization.

Most systems to split water into its components -- hydrogen and oxygen -- require two catalysts, one to spur a reaction to separate the hydrogen and a second to produce oxygen. The new catalyst, made of iron and dinickel phosphides on commercially available nickel foam, performs both functions.

Researchers said it has the potential to dramatically lower the amount of energy required to produce hydrogen from water while generating a high current density, a measure of hydrogen production. Lower energy requirements means the hydrogen could be produced at a lower cost.

"It puts us closer to commercialization," said Zhifeng Ren, M.D. Anderson Chair Professor of physics at UH and lead author of a paper describing the new catalyst published Friday in Nature Communications.

Hydrogen is considered a desirable source of clean energy, in the form of fuel cells to power electric motors or burned in internal combustion engines, along with a number of industrial uses. Because it can be compressed or converted to liquid, it is more easily stored than some other forms of energy, said Ren, who also is a researcher at the Texas Center for Superconductivity at UH.

But finding a practical, inexpensive and environmentally friendly way to produce large amounts of hydrogen gas -- especially by splitting water into its component parts -- has been a challenge.

Most hydrogen is currently produced through steam methane reforming and coal gasification; those methods raise the fuel's carbon footprint despite the fact that it burns cleanly.

And while traditional catalysts can produce hydrogen from water, co-author Shuo Chen, assistant professor of physics at UH, said they generally rely on expensive platinum group elements. That raises the cost, making large-scale water splitting impractical.

"In contrast, our materials are based on earth abundant elements and exhibit comparable performance with those of platinum group materials," she said. "It can be potentially scaled-up at low cost, which makes it very attractive and promising for the commercialization of water splitting."

Researchers said the catalyst remained stable and effective through more than 40 hours of testing.

The new catalyst, they wrote, "proves to be an outstanding bifunctional catalyst for overall water splitting, exhibiting both extremely high OER (oxygen evolution reaction) and HER (hydrogen evolution reaction) activities in the same alkaline electrolyte. Indeed, it sets a new record in alkaline water electrolyzers (1.42 V to afford 10 mA cm-2), while at the commercially practical current density of 500 mA cm-2."

Previous catalysts have used different materials to spur a reaction to produce the hydrogen than those that are used to produce the oxygen. Ren said the interaction between the iron phosphide particles and the dinickel phosphide particles boosted both reactions. "Somehow a joint effort of the two materials is better than any individual material," he said.

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How your brain decides between knowledge and ignorance

We have a 'thirst for knowledge' but sometime 'ignorance is bliss', so how do we choose between these two mind states at any given time?

UCL psychologists have discovered our brains use the same algorithm and neural architecture to evaluate the opportunity to gain information, as it does to evaluate rewards like food or money.

Funded by the Wellcome Trust, the research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also finds that people will spend money to both obtain advance knowledge of a good upcoming event and to remain ignorant of an upcoming bad event.

Senior author Dr Tali Sharot (UCL Experimental Psychology) said: "The pursuit of knowledge is a basic feature of human nature, however, in issues ranging from health to finance, people sometimes choose to remain ignorant."

"Our research shows that the brain's reward circuitry selectively treats the opportunity to gain knowledge about future favorable outcomes, but not unfavorable outcomes, as a reward in and of itself, explaining why knowledge may not always be preferred"

In the study 62 participants performed a computer task, and were asked whether they wanted to receive information or remain ignorant about the outcome of lotteries, which had a mixture of favourable (high probability of winning) or unfavourable (high probability of losing) odds. The lottery was played out regardless of whether the volunteers selected to know the outcome and they received the total payment of all lotteries at the end of the game.

In addition, the brains activity of 36 of the participants was scanned while they were performing the task. The researchers found that activity in the brain's reward system -- the nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area -- in response to the opportunity to receive information about good lotteries, but not about bad lotteries, displayed a pattern similar to what is observed in response to material rewards. This brain signal was independent from the brain response observed when participants found out whether they won or lost the lottery and predicted their preference for information.

"When participants were told they were about to gain information, the more likely information was to convey good news, the more likely we were to observe a neural signature typical of reward processing," Dr Sharot added.

"The findings may help explain why people are more likely to check their bank accounts when they believe their value has gone up and less likely to do so when they suspect it has gone down."

Lead author, Dr Caroline Charpentier, (formerly UCL Psychology, now at the California Institute of Technology), said: "Our findings are consistent with the theory that beliefs have utility in and of themselves. This means believing that something will happen has the power to affect us in positive and negative ways, similar to how actual events affect us," says lead author.

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Meteorite 'Black Beauty' expands window for when life might have existed on Mars

The oldest known zircon from Mars.

The early surface of Mars consisting of a liquid magma ocean crystallized extremely rapidly, just 20 million year after the formation of the solar system. Thereafter, a solid crust emerged on the red planet potentially housing oceans with water and life. This was about 130 million years before a corresponding solid crust appeared on Earth. New evidence for this rapid crystallization and crust formation on Mars has just been published in a study from the Centre for Star and Planet Formation at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen. The study, based on the analysis of the rare Mars meteorite Black Beauty, significantly expands the window for when life might have existed on Mars.

Crust formation is an important step in the development of terrestrial planets, and what makes Black Beauty special and expensive is that it contains small pieces of the crust from Mars. More precisely, Black Beauty contains the rare mineral zircon, in which researchers have found a high concentration of hafnium.

"Zircon is a very robust mineral that is ideally suited to provide absolute ages. In this context, the zircons can be used to establish a temporal framework to understand the formation history of the Martian crust," says Professor Martin Bizzarro. "Zircon also acts as a small time capsule as it preserves information about the environment where and when it was created. In this case, a time capsule with hafnium that originates from the earliest crust of Mars, which was present approximately 100 million years before the oldest zircon of Black Beauty was created. Thus, Mars got an early start compared to Earth, whose solid crust wasn't formed until much later."

However, it required a certain amount of courage to reach this result.

We crushed the meteorite

The original 319.8 grams heavy meteorite Black Beauty was found in the Sahara Desert in 2011. It soon became apparent that the meteorite was something special and it currently has a sales price of approximately $10,000 per gram. A year ago, Professor Martin Bizzarro managed to acquire 44 grams of Black Beauty with help from various funding agencies and exchange of meteorites from the museum's collection.

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Mars valleys traced back to precipitation

The central portion of Osuga Valles, which has a total length of 164 km. In some places, it is 20 km wide and plunges to a depth of 900 m.

The surface of Mars bears imprints of structures that resemble fluvial steam networks on Earth. Scientists therefore assume that there must have been once enough water on the red planet to feed water streams that incised their path into the soil. For years, however, scientists have been debating the source from which this water must have originated: was it rainwater that caused streams and rivers to swell? Or did water ice in the soil melt due to volcanic activity, and seep out to form rivers? Each of these scenarios leads to a completely different conclusion about the climatic history of the red planet.

A new study now suggests that the branching structure of the former river networks on Mars has striking similarities with terrestrial arid landscapes. This has been demonstrated in a recent paper published in Science Advances by physicist Hansjörg Seybold from the group of James Kirchner, ETH professor at the Institute for Terrestrial Ecosystems, and planetary specialist Edwin Kite from the University of Chicago.

Valleys eroded mainly by rainwater

Using statistics from all mapped river valleys on Mars, the researchers conclude that the contours still visible today must have been created by superficial run-off of (rain)water. Consequently, the influence of groundwater seepage from the soil can be excluded as a dominant process for shaping these features.

The distribution of the branching angles of the valleys on Mars is very similar to those found in arid landscapes on Earth. According to lead author Seybold, this implies that there must have been a similar hydrological environment with sporadic heavy rainfall events on Mars over a prolonged period of time and that this rainwater may have run off quickly over the surface shaping the valley networks. This is how river valleys develop in arid regions on Earth. For example, in Arizona, researchers observed the same valley network patterns in a landscape where astronauts are training for future Mars missions. Valleys in arid regions fork at a narrow angle.

The branching angles on Mars are comparatively low. Seybold therefore rules out the influence of groundwater sapping as the major channel forming process on Mars. River networks that are formed by re-emerging groundwater, as found, for example, in Florida, tend to have much wider branching angles between the two tributaries and do not match the narrow angles of streams in arid areas.

Conditions such as those found in terrestrial arid landscapes today probably prevailed on Mars for only a relatively short period about 3.6 to 3.8 billion years ago. In that period, the atmosphere on Mars may have been much denser than it is today. "Recent research shows that there must have been much more water on Mars than previously assumed," says Seybold.

Evaporation made it rain

One hypothesis suggests that the northern third of Mars was covered by an ocean at that time. Water evaporated, condensed around the high volcanoes of the highlands to the south of the ocean and led to heavy precipitation. As a result, rivers formed, which left traces that can still be observed on Mars today.

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More clues that Earth-like exoplanets are indeed Earth-like

The artist's depiction of Kepler-186f.

A new study from the Georgia Institute of Technology provides new clues indicating that an exoplanet 500 light-years away is much like Earth.

Kepler-186f is the first identified Earth-sized planet outside the solar system orbiting a star in the habitable zone. This means it's the proper distance from its host star for liquid water to pool on the surface.

The Georgia Tech study used simulations to analyze and identify the exoplanet's spin axis dynamics. Those dynamics determine how much a planet tilts on its axis and how that tilt angle evolves over time. Axial tilt contributes to seasons and climate because it affects how sunlight strikes the planet's surface.

The researchers suggest that Kepler-186f's axial tilt is very stable, much like the Earth, making it likely that it has regular seasons and a stable climate. The Georgia Tech team thinks the same is true for Kepler-62f, a super-Earth-sized planet orbiting around a star about 1,200 light-years away from us.

How important is axial tilt for climate? Large variability in axial tilt could be a key reason why Mars transformed from a watery landscape billions of years ago to today's barren desert.

"Mars is in the habitable zone in our solar system, but its axial tilt has been very unstable -- varying from zero to 60 degrees," said Georgia Tech Assistant Professor Gongjie Li, who led the study together with graduate student Yutong Shan from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "That instability probably contributed to the decay of the Martian atmosphere and the evaporation of surface water."

As a comparison, Earth's axial tilt oscillates more mildly -- between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees, going from one extreme to the other every 10,000 or so years.

The orientation angle of a planet's orbit around its host star can be made to oscillate by gravitational interaction with other planets in the same system. If the orbit were to oscillate at the same speed as the precession of the planet's spin axis (akin to the circular motion exhibited by the rotation axis of a top or gyroscope), the spin axis would also wobble back and forth, sometimes dramatically.

Mars and Earth interact strongly with each other, as well as with Mercury and Venus. As a result, by themselves, their spin axes would precess with the same rate as the orbital oscillation, which may cause large variations in their axial tilt. Fortunately, the moon keeps Earth's variations in check. The moon increases our planet's spin axis precession rate and makes it differ from the orbital oscillation rate. Mars, on the other hand, doesn't have a large enough satellite to stabilize its axial tilt. "It appears that both exoplanets are very different from Mars and the Earth because they have a weaker connection with their sibling planets," said Li, a faculty member in the School of Physics. "We don't know whether they possess moons, but our calculations show that even without satellites, the spin axes of Kepler-186f and 62f would have remained constant over tens of millions of years."

Kepler-186f is less than 10 percent larger in radius than Earth, but its mass, composition and density remain a mystery. It orbits its host star every 130 days. According to NASA, the brightness of that star at high noon, while standing on 186f, would appear as bright as the sun just before sunset here on Earth. Kepler-186f is located in the constellation Cygnus as part of a five-planet star system.

Kepler-62f was the most Earth-like exoplanet until scientists noticed 186f in 2014. It's about 40 percent larger than our planet and is likely a terrestrial or ocean-covered world. It's in the constellation Lyra and is the outermost planet among five exoplanets orbiting a single star.

That's not to say either exoplanet has water, let alone life. But both are relatively good candidates.

"Our study is among the first to investigate climate stability of exoplanets and adds to the growing understanding of these potentially habitable nearby worlds," said Li.

"I don't think we understand enough about the origin of life to rule out the possibility of their presence on planets with irregular seasons," added Shan. "Even on Earth, life is remarkably diverse and has shown incredible resilience in extraordinarily hostile environments.

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This curious animal grew larger over time -- but its brain didn't quite keep up

Ornella's research on the brain evolution of mammals involves developing 3D models of an endocast, which is the imprint of the brain inside the cranium.

A new U of T Scarborough study has found that the ancestor of the modern day mountain beaver had a larger relative brain size.

The research, which is published in the journal Palaeontology, offers a rare case of an animal's brain becoming smaller relative to its body size, likely due to a change in its lifestyle over time.

The mountain beaver (Aplodontia rufa) is a rodent that's adapted to burrowing, meaning it lives mostly underground in tunnels dug deep into the soil. But fossil records show that its 30-million-year old ancestor was better adapted to living in trees, similar to squirrels.

"Early squirrels and the mountain beaver's ancestor had a similar, relative brain size," says Ornella Bertrand, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology at U of T Scarborough and lead author of the study.

But something happened over time. While the mountain beaver can climb trees like its ancestor and squirrels -- albeit likely not as well -- they rarely travel too far from their burrows and are mostly nocturnal. As a result of mostly living underground and being less reliant on their vision, it appears an area of the neocortex responsible for sight may have shrunk over time.

"The brain is metabolically expensive, meaning it needs a lot of food energy to function," says Bertrand, whose research focuses on the brain evolution of mammals. "So the parts of the brain that are not crucial for survival might have been selected against."

Bertrand and her team compared virtual endocasts -- the imprint the brain makes against the inner part of the cranium -- and found that it may have been the part of the brain related to sight specifically that shrunk over time.

"There appears to be a relationship between being arboreal -- that is living in trees -- the size of the neocortex and strong vision," says Bertrand. She adds that over time as the modern mountain beaver relied less on its vision, its neocortex decreased in size as a result.

While the modern mountain beaver actually has a larger overall brain size compared to its ancestor, it has a smaller brain relative to its body size, notes Bertrand.

An evolutionary decrease in brain size has been observed in domesticated animals like chickens, pigs and dogs, but this is a rare example of a decrease in brain size due to a specific shift in where the animal spends most of its time, says Bertrand.

As for when this change began to take place, it's likely too hard to tell at this point. "It's difficult to pinpoint when the relative size of the brain started to decrease since we only have three specimens to go by," she adds.

Mountain beavers are native to the northwestern U.S. and parts of southern British Columbia, particularly in the Cascade Mountains. Large by rodent standards -- averaging about 500 to 900 g and between 30 to 50 cm in length -- they're not closely related to the North American beaver.

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Insight into the physics of the Higgs particle

This is Corinna Kollath from the Helmholtz-Institut für Strahlen- und Kernphysik at the University of Bonn.

Physicists at the University of Bonn have succeeded in putting a superconducting gas into an exotic state. Their experiments allow new insights into the properties of the Higgs particle, but also into fundamental characteristics of superconductors. The publication, which is already available online, will soon appear in the journal Nature Physics.

For their experiments, scientists at the University of Bonn used a gas made of lithium atoms, which they cooled down significantly. At a certain temperature, the state of the gas changes abruptly: It becomes a superconductor that conducts a current without any resistance. Physicists also speak of a phase transition. A similar sudden change occurs with water when it freezes.

The lithium gas changes to a more orderly state at its phase transition. This includes the formation of so-called Cooper pairs, which are combinations of two atoms that behave like a single particle to the outside.

Partner-dancing atoms

These pairs behave fundamentally differently from individual atoms: They move together and can do so without scattering on other atoms or pairs. This is the reason for the superconductivity. But what happens when you try to excite the pairs?

"We illuminated the gas with microwave radiation," explains Prof. Dr. Michael Köhl from the Physics Institute at the University of Bonn. "This allowed us to create a state in which the pairs start to vibrate and the quality of the superconductivity therefore oscillated very quickly: One moment the gas was a good superconductor, the next a bad one."

This common oscillation of the Cooper pairs corresponds to the Higgs boson discovered at the CERN Accelerator in 2013. As this state is very unstable, only a handful of working groups worldwide have succeeded in producing it.

The experiments allow an insight into certain physical properties of the Higgs boson. For example, the physicists hope that studies like these will enable them to better understand the decay of this extremely short-lived particle in the medium term.

Fast-switchable superconductors

But the experiments are also interesting for another reason: They show a way to switch superconductivity on and off very quickly. Superconductors normally try to remain in their conductive state for as long as possible. They can be dissuaded by heating, but this is a very slow process. The experiments show that in principle this can also be over a thousand times faster. This insight may open up completely new applications for superconductors.

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Paleontologists ID two new Miocene mammals in Bolivia

The animals, which look similar to small moose or deer in a paleoartist's rendering, are being dubbed Theosodon arozquetai and Llullataruca shockeyi, ungulates native only to Bolivia

Researchers at Case Western Reserve University and two other universities have discovered the 13-million-year-old fossils of a pair of new species of extinct hoofed mammals known as "litopterns" from a site in Bolivia.

The animals, which look similar to small moose or deer in a paleoartist's rendering, are being dubbed Theosodon arozquetai and Llullataruca shockeyi, ungulates native only to Bolivia. They lived in the latter part of the middle Miocene epoch, a time interval from which relatively few fossils have been collected in South America.

The discoveries, announced in the June edition of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, are important not only because they document two species previously unknown to science, but also because they come from the tropical latitudes of South America. The northern half of South America harbors a rich diversity of living mammals, but is a difficult place to find fossils of them.

"Studying fossils from regions such as Bolivia, where few others have looked, has allowed us discover and describe a variety of new species that are changing our views about the history of South America's mammals," said Darin Croft, a biology professor at Case Western Reserve, who co-led the expeditions that recovered the fossils.

The lead author on the journal publication was one of Croft's former students, Case Western Reserve graduate Andrew McGrath, who is now studying this group of animals for his PhD at the University of California-Santa Barbara.

"These new species hint at what might be hiding in the northern parts of South America," McGrath said. "For example, close relatives of Llullataruca disappeared from southern South America around 20 million years ago, but based on our research, we now know they were able to persist some seven million years longer in Bolivia and northern South America than in Patagonia."

Federico Anaya of Bolivia's Universidad Autónoma "Tomas Frías" in Potosí also collaborated on the project. Croft and Anaya have been working together in Bolivia for more than 15 years.

Croft, who has a primary appointment in anatomy at the School of Medicine, is considered one of the world's leaders in neotropical paleomammalogy, the study of South America's prehistoric mammals. Since South America was geographically isolated for most of the past 66 million years, its rich fossil record makes it a perfect location to "investigate topics such as mammal adaptation, diversification, and community ecology," according to his website.

Some of that work was covered in his 2016 book with Chicago-based artist Velizar Simeonovski, Horned Armadillos and Rafting Monkeys: The Fascinating Fossil Mammals of South America, which received an Independent Publisher Book Awards gold medal in science in 2017.

"South America was untouched by mammals from other continents for millions of years, so the solutions its native mammals came up with were often different from those developed by mammals elsewhere," he said. "By comparing how mammals on different continents have evolved to deal with similar ecological situations, we are able to gauge which characteristics developed due to universal ecological principles and which were peculiar to a certain place and time."

Recently, Croft and collaborators explored that question by digging further into the mysteries of how some 11 species of mammals known as "sparassodonts"-extinct weasel-to-jaguar-sized meat-eating marsupials-were able to co-exist during the early Miocene (about 18 million years ago) in southern Argentina.

The research has left Croft and others wrestling with what he calls a "carnivore conundrum."

In short, they are being challenged by findings that suggest that either all ancient carnivorous sparassodonts were crammed into a very narrow meat-eating niche (think mountain lion) -- or some were actually omnivores (think raccoon), but had teeth that did not reflect their varied diet.

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Milky Way is rich in grease-like molecules

Milky Way

Our galaxy is rich in grease-like molecules, according to an Australian-Turkish team. Astronomers at the University of New South Wales in Sydney (UNSW), and Ege University in Turkey used a laboratory to manufacture material with the same properties as interstellar dust and used their results to estimate the amount of 'space grease' found in the Milky Way. Their results appear in a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Organic matter of different kinds contains carbon, an element considered essential for life. There is though real uncertainty over its abundance, and only half the carbon expected is found between the stars in its pure form. The rest is chemically bound in two main forms, grease-like (aliphatic) and mothball-like (aromatic).

The UNSW / Ege team used a laboratory to create material with the same properties as interstellar dust. They mimicked the process by which organic molecules are synthesised in the outflows of carbon stars, by expanding a carbon-containing plasma into a vacuum at low temperature. The material was collected and then analysed by a combination of techniques. Using magnetic resonance and spectroscopy (splitting light into its constituent wavelengths) they were able to determine how strongly the material absorbed light with a certain infrared wavelength, a marker for aliphatic carbon.

"Combining our lab results with observations from astronomical observatories allows us to measure the amount of aliphatic carbon between us and the stars," explained Professor Tim Schmidt, from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Exciton Science in the School of Chemistry at UNSW Sydney.

The researchers found that there are about 100 greasy carbon atoms for every million hydrogen atoms, accounting for between a quarter and a half of the available carbon. In the Milky Way Galaxy, this amounts to about 10 billion trillion trillion tonnes of greasy matter, or enough for 40 trillion trillion trillion packs of butter.

Schmidt is quick to dispel the comparison with anything edible: "This space grease is not the kind of thing you'd want to spread on a slice of toast! It's dirty, likely toxic and only forms in the environment of interstellar space (and our laboratory). It's also intriguing that organic material of this kind -- material that gets incorporated into planetary systems -- is so abundant."

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`Oumuamua gets a boost

This artist's impression shows the first interstellar object discovered in the Solar System, `Oumuamua. Observations made with ESO's Very Large Telescope, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, and others show that the object is moving faster than predicted while leaving the Solar System. Researchers assume that venting material from its surface due to solar heating is responsible for this behaviour. This outgassing can be seen in this artist's impression as a subtle cloud being ejected from the side of the object facing the Sun. As outgassing is a behavior typical for comets, the team thinks that `Oumuamua's previous classification as an interstellar asteroid has to be corrected.

`Oumuamua -- the first interstellar object discovered within our Solar System -- has been the subject of intense scrutiny since its discovery in October 2017. Now, by combining data from the ESO's Very Large Telescope and other observatories, an international team of astronomers has found that the object is moving faster than predicted. The measured gain in speed is tiny and `Oumuamua is still slowing down because of the pull of the Sun -- just not as fast as predicted by celestial mechanics.

The team, led by Marco Micheli (European Space Agency) explored several scenarios to explain the faster-than-predicted speed of this peculiar interstellar visitor. The most likely explanation is that `Oumuamua is venting material from its surface due to solar heating -- a behaviour known as outgassing. The thrust from this ejected material is thought to provide the small but steady push that is sending `Oumuamua hurtling out of the Solar System faster than expected -- as of 1 June 2018 it is traveling at roughly 114,000 kilometres per hour.

Such outgassing is a behaviour typical for comets and contradicts the previous classification of `Oumuamua as an interstellar asteroid. "We think this is a tiny, weird comet," commented Marco Micheli. "We can see in the data that its boost is getting smaller the farther away it travels from the Sun, which is typical for comets."

Usually, when comets are warmed by the Sun they eject dust and gas, which form a cloud of material -- called a coma (cometary) -- around them, as well as the characteristic tail . However, the research team could not detect any visual evidence of outgassing.

"We did not see any dust, coma, or tail, which is unusual," explained co-author Karen Meech of the University of Hawaii, USA. Meech led the discovery team's characterisation of `Oumuamua in 2017. "We think that 'Oumuamua may vent unusually large, coarse dust grains."

The team speculated that perhaps the small dust grains adorning the surface of most comets eroded during `Oumuamua's journey through interstellar space, with only larger dust grains remaining. Though a cloud of these larger particles would not be bright enough to be detected, it would explain the unexpected change to 'Oumuamua's speed.

Not only is `Oumuamua's hypothesised outgassing an unsolved mystery, but also its interstellar origin. The team originally performed the new observations on `Oumuamua to exactly determine its path which would have probably allowed it to trace the object back to its parent star system. The new results means it will be more challenging to obtain this information.

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