#sciecne

[llama-aesthetics]

Ada Bright Eyes "Nerd" 👓

Sewn From: School Girl's Uniform

Sewn Date: March 1 (Pisces ♓)

National Reading Month

[tradescantialover]

POV: You go to hell. Maybe you stole something from walmart or maybe you were gay, I don’t care and it’s not important. Satan comes up to you. “For the rest of eternity, you will be forced to solve the Lagrangian of coupled oscillatory systems for the equations of motion by hand, but you will be cursed to always mix up the subscripts!!” he says. You immediately start crying and begging God for forgiveness. “Was I really that bad?” you ask. God turns away as you start your first system: two pendulums connected by a spring. 

[atomicbug]

The fact that Valery would support trans rights keeps me living

[explore-blog]

French artist Paul Sougy's stunning mid-century scientific diagrams of plants, animals, and the human body, forgotten for decades, newly salvaged from dusty vintage textbooks and obscure French government archives. 

[biocheminpics]

An app for academics

I’d like to shamelessly plug one of my favorite academic apps. Researcher is basically a journal article aggregation app that lets you create custom topic-specific feeds, lets you set up notifications for journals and topics, and has built-in institutional access. It can even be linked up with Mendeley to automatically update your catalog of articles.

[evolving-science]

Quote of the day...

[neurosciencenews]

Can How Does Solid Stress From Brain Tumors Cause Neuron Loss and Neurological Dysfunction?

Researchers identify characteristics of tumors most likely to impose solid stress and identify the neuroprotective drug lithium as a promising treatment strategy.

The research is in Nature Biomedical Engineering. (full access paywall)

[materialsworld]

5 things you didn’t know about... lithium and cobalt

Credit: NATURE©Macmillan Publishers Limited. Regions with highly concentrated reserves include the lithium (Li) triangle in South America and, for cobalt (Co), the Copperbelt in Central Africa.

1. According to a study, A cost and resource analysis of sodium-ion batteries, published in Nature Reviews Materials by researchers at Helmholtz Institute Ulm (HIU) of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, the availability of lithium and cobalt, components of lithium-ion batteries, could become critical as demand increases.

2. The researchers claim that while alternative battery technology, such as sodium-ion batteries, may offer partial relief to this demand, development and performance are not yet up to scratch and they are currently seen as a complementary technology to lithium-ion batteries.

3. South America is home to about two-thirds of global lithium reserves, while China and Australia are also large-scale producers. Currently, Chile has the brine deposit with the highest production of lithium. The researchers consider the size of global reserves to be sufficient to meet future demand – driven by an expected increase in the use of electric vehicles. But, the HIU team claim lithium production will need to expand substantially to meet future demand.

4. Cobalt, on the other hand, is described in the paper as ‘already under pressure’ and ‘highly dependent on reserves located in unstable regions as well as on the co-production of other elements’.

5. Supply shortages of lithium and cobalt may drive the use of sodium-ion batteries. Battery research is adapting to these shortages, according to Stefano Passerini, Deputy Director at HIU, with most technology currently being developed not relying on cobalt. However, these technologies aren’t expected to enter the market in the next five to 10 years, as they can’t compete with lithium-ion batteries in terms of cost and performance.

To read the study, visit go.nature.com/2pHxrLA 

To find out more see the upcoming May issue of Materials World.