Using 100-year-old minerals processing methods, chemical engineering students have found a solution to a looming 21st-century problem: how to economically recycle lithium ion batteries.
Credit: Lei Pan, Michigan Tech

Using 100-year-old minerals processing methods, chemical engineering students have found a solution to a looming 21st-century problem: how to economically recycle lithium ion batteries. Lei Pan’s team of chemical engineering students had worked long and hard on their research project, and they were happy just to be showing their results at the People, Prosperity and the Planet (P3) competition last April in Washington, DC. What they didn’t expect was to be mobbed by enthusiastic onlookers.56-58F

“We got a lot of ‘oh wow!’ responses, from eight-year-olds wanting to know how it w...

Illustration of the early solar disk, with an inset image of a blue hibonite crystal, one of the first minerals to form in the Solar System. Credit: © Field Museum, University of Chicago, NASA, ESA, and E. Feild (STScl).

By examining tiny blue crystals trapped inside meteorites, scientists were able to figure out what the sun was like before the Earth formed – and apparently, it had a pretty rowdy start. When scientists analyzed the chemical make-up of these crystals, they found atoms that would only be there if the early sun was spitting out lots of high-energy particles – the solar version of going through the ‘terrible twos.’

Our Sun’s beginnings are a mystery. It burst into being 4.6 billion years ago, about 50 million years before the Earth formed...

Highlights
• Loss of IRF4 in BAT causes decreased exercise capacity and a selective myopathy
• IRF4 represses myogenic genes in BAT, including the myokine myostatin
• Neutralizing serum myostatin rescues the ability of BATI4KO mice to exercise normally
•Warming reduces IRF4 in BAT, causing myopathy that is reversed by removal of BAT

Researchers open the door to potential new therapies for certain metabolic and muscular diseases. Now, endocrinologists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) have shown for the first time that brown adipose tissue (BAT), or brown fat, can exert control over skeletal muscle function. Alterations to the brown adipose tissue in mice resulted in a significant and consistent reduction in exercise performance...

A soft robotic device powered by popcorn, constructed by researchers in Cornell’s Collective Embodied Intelligence Lab.
Credit: Image courtesy of Cornell University

Cornell University researchers have discovered how to power simple robots with a novel substance that, when heated, can expand more than 10X in size, change its viscosity by a factor of 10 and transition from regular to highly irregular granules with surprising force.

“Popcorn-Driven Robotic Actuators,” a recent paper co-authored by Steven Ceron, mechanical engineering doctoral student, and Kirstin H. Petersen, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, examines how popcorn’s unique qualities can power inexpensive robotic devices that grip, expand or change rigidity.

“The goal of our lab is to try to make very...