It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, June 26, 2020
Researchers identify N95 respirator decontamination method using microwave-generated steam
AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR MICROBIOLOGY
Washington, DC - June 25, 2020 - Due to the rapid spread of COVID-19, there is an increasing shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) crucial to protecting health care workers from infection. N95 respirators are recommended by the CDC as the ideal protection method from COVID-19 and, although traditionally single-use, PPE shortages have necessitated the need for reuse. New research published this week in mBio an open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, describes an effective, standardized method of decontamination for hospitals and health care centers facing N95 respirator shortages.
The researchers, from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, have detailed a reproducible decontamination approach that all health care workers would be able to utilize. "We identified an effective method of N95 decontamination by microwave-generated steam utilizing universally accessible materials. Our method resulted in almost complete sterilization after only 3 min of treatment and did not appear to affect the integrity of N95 filtration or fit with repeated treatment," the researchers write.
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Please email communications@asmusa.org for a copy of the study or to arrange an interview with the researchers.
The American Society for Microbiology is one of the largest professional societies dedicated to the life sciences and is composed of 30,000 scientists and health practitioners. ASM's mission is to promote and advance the microbial sciences.
ASM advances the microbial sciences through conferences, publications, certifications and educational opportunities. It enhances laboratory capacity around the globe through training and resources. It provides a network for scientists in academia, industry and clinical settings. Additionally, ASM promotes a deeper understanding of the microbial sciences to diverse audiences.
KUNG-FU FIGHTING
Tiny brains, big surprise: Eavesdropping wasps gain insights about fighting abilities of potential rivals
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Paper wasps eavesdrop on fighting rivals to rapidly assess potential opponents without personal risk. This new finding adds to mounting evidence that even mini-brained insects have an impressive capacity to learn, remember and make social deductions about others.
Many vertebrate animals--including some birds and fish and numerous primates--minimize the costs of conflict by using "social eavesdropping" to learn about the fighting ability of potential rivals before interacting with them personally.
Keeping track of a network of individually differentiated social relationships is thought to be cognitively challenging and, until recently, was considered to be beyond the reach of lowly insects like paper wasps, which have brains a million times smaller than the human brain.
But a growing body of evidence suggests that the miniature nervous systems of insects do not limit sophisticated behaviors. The capacity for complex insect behavior may be shaped more by social environment than brain size, according to University of Michigan biologist Elizabeth Tibbetts, senior author of a paper scheduled for publication June 25 in the journal Current Biology.
"It is surprising that wasps can observe and remember a complex network of social interactions between individuals without directly interacting with them," said Tibbetts, a professor in the U-M Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. "Complex social relationships are thought to favor the evolution of large brains and increased social intelligence, but paper wasp brains are relatively small."
In the study, Tibbetts and her students collected female Polistes fuscatus paper wasps from sites around Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the early spring.
Unlike a honeybee colony--which has a single queen and multiple equally ranked female workers--paper wasp colonies contain several reproductive females called foundresses. These females battle their rivals and form complex, linear dominance hierarchies based on the outcomes of those fights. A wasp's rank in the hierarchy determines its share of reproduction, work and food.
In the laboratory, the researchers used enamel to mark all foundresses with unique color patterns on the thorax. Then, two at a time, "fighter" wasps were placed in a small container known as the fighting arena while two "bystander" wasps observed the pair through clear plastic partitions.
All trials were videotaped, and a research assistant assigned scores to each fighter using an aggression index that awards points for behaviors like biting, mounting, grappling and stinging. Dominance rank was determined using the number of mounts--a dominance behavior in which the dominant wasp drums her antennae on the subordinate while the subordinate crouches and lowers her antennae--during a fight.
Later, bystander wasps were paired in the fighting arena either with a wasp they had observed (experimental trial) or a fighter they had never seen before (control trial). Tibbetts and her students compared the behaviors in the experimental and control trials to determine the role of social eavesdropping.
They found that bystander wasps were more aggressive when paired with an individual that was the victim of lots of aggression in a previous bout, as well as individuals who initiated very little aggression in the previous fight.
By comparing experimental and control trials, the researchers were also able to reject non-eavesdropping explanations for the observations, including phenomena called priming and winner/loser effects.
"The results show that P. fuscatus wasps use social eavesdropping," Tibbetts said. "Bystanders observe other individuals fight, and they use information about the fight to modulate subsequent behavior."
In previous studies over more than a decade, Tibbetts and her colleagues showed that paper wasps recognize individuals of their species by variations in their facial markings, and they behave more aggressively toward wasps with unfamiliar faces.
They also demonstrated that paper wasps have surprisingly long memories and base their behavior on what they remember of previous social interactions.
But the previous work focused on how wasps use individual recognition during direct interactions and did not test--as this new study did--whether wasps learn about other individuals via observation alone.
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In addition to Tibbetts, the authors of the Current Biology paper are Ellery Wong and Sarah Bonello of the U-M Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. The work was funded in part by the National Science Foundation.
Women underrepresented in academic hospital medicine leadership roles, study finds
JOHNS HOPKINS MEDICINE
IMAGE: A NEW STUDY BY JOHNS HOPKINS MEDICINE RESEARCHERS SHOWS THAT WOMEN ARE UNDERREPRESENTED AS DIRECTORS AND FULL PROFESSORS IN ACADEMIC HOSPITAL MEDICAL PROGRAMS ACROSS THE NATION. view more
CREDIT: M.E. NEWMAN, JOHNS HOPKINS MEDICINE
In recent years, the number of women who entered U.S. medical school surpassed the number of men. But gender inequities still exist in many areas of medicine. Of academic hospital medicine programs, 79% are run by men, Johns Hopkins researchers report in a new paper published March 3 in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, and male hospitalist leaders are more likely to have attained the rank of full professor than women leaders.
"Despite making a number of strides in medicine when it comes to gender bias, this is an area where we still haven't reached full equality," says Carrie Herzke, M.D., assistant professor of medicine and associate vice chair for clinical affairs in the Department of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Previous studies found that, in academic medicine, women comprise only 39% of full-time faculty and 22% of full-time professors. They are also significantly underrepresented in hospital leadership positions, and there are gender disparities regarding career advancement and compensation.
Hospital medicine as a dedicated medical specialty is a relatively young field. "Hospitalists" who are trained in internal medicine and focus their work on hospitalized patients rather than outpatient settings have only existed for about two decades. Due to how new the field is, some speculate it may have fewer gender imbalances than more established fields of medicine.
In collaboration with the Society of Hospital Medicine, Herzke and her colleagues conducted a survey of all U.S. academic hospital programs associated with the Association of American Medical Colleges. After identifying 135 programs, surveys were sent electronically to academic hospitalist leaders of each program. Participants were asked about the gender of the hospitalist program leader, the program's size and organization, faculty characteristics, and perceptions about promotion and faculty development.
"We had a sense that there were some gender issues when people had looked at these areas before," says Herzke. "Obviously, our hope was that we would see fewer inequities in our data."
Of the 135 programs, 80 responded to the survey, and responding programs did not differ significantly from nonresponding programs in terms of funding, region, age or type of institution. While programs reported approximately equal numbers of male and female faculty members, 79% of program directors were male. Moreover, 37% of male hospitalist leaders were full professors while no female hospitalist leaders held that rank.
"Even in this new specialty, we don't have gender parity," says Herzke. "There have been numerous studies suggesting that programs, and society in general, do better when we have more diverse teams and diverse leadership."
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Herzke and her colleagues plan more studies to look at promotion and faculty development in academic hospital medicine. Also, they plan similar studies to understand if there are issues with racial inequity in leadership in academic hospital medicine. This topic in particular, says Herzke, is incredibly important to evaluate and, if inequality exists, address.
In addition to Carrie Herzke, authors of the Journal of General Internal Medicine paper are Amanda Bertram, Hsin-Chieh Yeh, Ariella Apfel and Joseph Cofrancesco Jr. of Johns Hopkins and Joanna Bonsall of Emory University.
The authors received no financial support for the research
Superbug impact on the gut
MONASH UNIVERSITY
IMAGE: E CADHERIN AND BETA CATENIN STAINED INFECTED MOUSE COLONIC TISSUE. view more
CREDIT: (C) MONASH BDI
Monash University researchers have discovered that the devastating bacterial superbug Clostridioides difficile hijacks the human wound healing system in order to cause serious and persistent disease, opening up the development of new therapies to treat the disease.
Clostridioides difficile is the most common hospital-acquired disease and causes persistent and life-threatening gut infections - particularly in elderly and immunocompromised patients.
The infection is very difficult to treat, and often repeatedly reoccurs in patients even after they have been given powerful and debilitating antibiotics for many months. C. difficile is also highly resistant to antibiotics, which greatly complicates treatment.
A team based in the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute (BDI) found that C. difficile massively activates a human enzyme called plasminogen in order to destroy gut tissue and to help spread the infection throughout the patient. Ordinarily, plasminogen, and its active form plasmin, is deployed in a highly controlled fashion to break down scar tissue and help wounds heal.
"The results were a huge surprise, and revealed that the severe damage caused to the gut by C. difficile was actually caused by a human enzyme rather than a bacterial toxin," said study co-leader and infectious disease expert Prof Dena Lyras.
Given their findings, the researchers decided to investigate whether potent antibodies developed by the team and that inhibited the plasminogen / plasmin system could be used to treat the disease.
"We found that an antibody that prevented plasminogen from being activated dramatically stalled the progress of infection and tissue damage," said first author Milena Awad.
The researchers now aim to commercialise their antibodies in order to treat a range of bacterial and inflammatory diseases.
An advantage of targeting a human protein in an infectious disease is that resistance to the therapy is far less likely to occur.
"The antibody could have broad utility, since the plasminogen / plasmin system is dysregulated in a range of different serious inflammatory and infectious diseases - for example, the plasminogen system most likely is a driver of the devastating lung damage seen in COVID-19," said study co-leader and structural biologist Prof James Whisstock.
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The study, published in the leading US journal Gastroenterology today, was led by senior authors Professor Dena Lyras, Dr Ruby Law and Professor James Whisstock, in conjunction with joint-lead authors Dr Milena Awad, Dr Melanie Hutton, and Dr Adam Quek.
Read the abstract of the paper in Gastroenterology titled: Human Plasminogen Exacerbates Clostridioides difficile Enteric Disease and Alters the Spore Surface
About the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute at Monash University
Committed to making the discoveries that will relieve the future burden of disease, the newly established Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute at Monash University brings together more than 120 internationally-renowned research teams. Our researchers are supported by world-class technology and infrastructure, and partner with industry, clinicians and researchers internationally to enhance lives through discovery.
ARACHNOPHOBIA TRIGGER TOO LATE
Spider baby boom in a warmer Arctic
Climate change leads to longer growing seasons in the Arctic. A new study shows that predators like wolf spiders respond to the changing conditions and have been able to produce two clutches of offspring during the short Arctic summer
AARHUS UNIVERSITY
IMAGE: THE SNOW DISAPPEARS EARLIER AND EARLIER FROM THE ARCTIC TUNDRA AND CLIMATE CHANGE THEREFORE ENTAILS A LONGER GROWTH SEASON FOR ARCTIC PLANTS AND ANIMALS. view more
CREDIT: TOKE T. HØYE
Climate change leads to longer growing seasons in the Arctic. A new study, which has just been published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, show that predators like wolf spiders respond to the changing conditions and have been able to produce two clutches of offspring during the short Arctic summer.
Arctic spiders are at the top of the food chain among invertebrates and are numerous on the Arctic tundra. They typically take several years to become adults, and only produce offspring .
But something is happening in the high north in these years. A lot, actually.
Climate change is more dramatic here than in no other place on Earth. The average temperature is increasing significantly and this affects the ecosystems.
Researchers have previously reported how plants bloom earlier and earlier in the season. There are also signs that species move farther north and up into the mountains.
A team of researchers led by senior researcher Toke T. Høye from the Arctic Research Centre and Department of Bioscience at Aarhus University has now shown that changes are also occurring in the reproduction of invertebrates.
For almost 20 years, researchers at the Zackenberg Research Station in north-eastern Greenland have caught wolf spiders as part of the monitoring programme Greenland Ecosystem Monitoring. The spiders were caught in small pitfall traps set up in different vegetation types.
Wolf spiders carry their eggs in a so-called egg sac. The researchers counted the number of eggs in the individual spider's egg sacs and compared this information with the time of the season that the animal was caught. By looking at the distribution of the number of eggs in the egg sacs throughout the season, it became clear that in some summers the spiders produced two egg sacs - a phenomenon that is known from warmer latitudes, but which has not previously been observed in the Arctic.
Arctic ecosystems are changing
"We now have the longest time series of spiders collected the Arctic. The large amount of data allows us to show how small animals in the Arctic change their life history in response to climate change," says Toke T. Høye.
The long time series tells the researchers that the earlier the snow disappears from the ground, the greater the proportion of spiders that can produce a second clutch of offspring.
"These changes in the life history have not been seen earlier and evidence suggests that the phenomenon plays an important role for Arctic insects and spiders," Toke T. Høye says.
The researchers see the spiders' response to climate change as an ability to adapt to the new conditions.
Wolf spiders feed on small organisms such as springtails in the soil. If there are more spiders - or insects - in the future Arctic, it can have an influence on the food chains on land.
The wolf spider Pardosa glacialis is extremely common in the Arctic tundra. If, in future, it produces two generations of offspring during a season, these may have a significant effect on the prey on which the spider lives.
"We can only speculate about how the ecosystems change, but we can now ascertain that changes in the reproduction of species are an important factor to include when we try to understand how Arctic ecosystems react to the rising temperatures on the planet," Toke T. Høye says.
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Bugs resort to several colours to protect themselves from predators
Colourful bugs look very different as young and adults, but why?
UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE
IMAGE: FEMALE AND NYMPH OF THE COTTON HARLEQUIN BUG SHOW THE GLORIOUS COLOURS, THAT HELP KEEP THEM SAFE. view more
CREDIT: ILIANA MEDINA
New research has revealed for the first time that shield bugs use a variety of colours throughout their lives to avoid predators.
Shield bugs are often bright, colourful insects that use colours to warn off their distastefulness to predators. The paper, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, found that it is impossible to predict how an adult bug will look like based on their colour when young.
"We found that in most species, the same individual bug will use different colour combinations as nymphs - young bugs - and adults, going for example from red and green to yellow and green," said lead author and ecologist, Dr Iliana Medina, from the University of Melbourne's School of Biosciences.
"This is significant because many of these species use colour to warn predators that they are distasteful, and for years it has been thought that animals living in the same environment - like nymphs and adults of the same species - should use similar warning colours, not different ones."
The joint research between scientists at the University of Melbourne and the Australian National University combined information on colour in young and adults for more than 100 species of shield bugs worldwide. They then used field work in Canberra, with white-winged choughs, to measure how likely these birds were to attack adult and nymphs of one Australian species of shield bug, the cotton harlequin bug.
Experiments were also conducted in the aviary, training two-week-old chicks to see how fast they learned to avoid nymphs and adults, then testing whether their previous experience with adults could reduce attack rates on nymphs.
"Our experiments with the cotton harlequin bug showed that predators could quickly learn to avoid both types of colour signals from nymphs and adults, but nymphs get a larger benefit," Dr Medina said.
"Although young and adult cotton harlequin bugs have different colours, previous experience with adults make chicks less likely to attack the nymphs. Also, chicks and wild predators that have never seen the insects before do not show much interest in eating them. The colours in these insects are a great strategy against predators."
Many animals such as frogs, insects and sea slugs use bright colourations to advertise toxicity or distastefulness. In theory, warning signals of prey that live in the same environment should be the same because predators can learn more effectively to avoid one type of pattern, instead of many different ones.
While this idea has been used to explain the great examples of mimicry in nature, and why distantly related species end up having the same warning colours, such as black and red, or black and yellow, researchers say there are multiple examples of variation in local warning signals and an overlooked type of variation is that across life stages.
"If predators were able to learn to avoid only one type of warning colour, we would expect nymphs and adults to look similar in many species," Dr Medina said. "What our findings show, however, is that the wide colour variation in shield bugs is probably the result of predators being able to learn to avoid different types of colourful signals."
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ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION
From Jekyll to Hyde: New study pinpoints mutation that makes E. coli deadlier
Scientists identify an important protein that increases "bacterial virulence," when mutated, changing harmless bacteria to harmful ones
OKAYAMA UNIVERSITY
IMAGE: SILKWORMS ARE USED IN INFECTION EXPERIMENTS TO PERFORM EXPERIMENTAL EVOLUTION OF PATHOGENIC BACTERIA. view more
CREDIT: CHIKARA KAITO
As far as humans are concerned, bacteria can be classified as either harmful, pathogenic bacteria and harmless or beneficial non-pathogenic bacteria. To develop better treatments for diseases caused by pathogenic bacteria, we need to have a good grasp on the mechanisms that cause some bacteria to be virulent. Scientists have identified genes that cause virulence, or capability to cause disease, but they do not fully know how bacteria evolve to become pathogenic.
To find out, Professor Chikara Kaito and his team of scientists from Okayama University, Japan, used a process called experimental evolution to identify molecular mechanisms that cells develop to gain useful traits, and published their findings in PLoS Pathogens. "We're excited by this research because no one has ever looked at virulence evolution of bacteria in an animal; studies before us looked at the evolution in cells," said Prof Kaito.
The scientists decided to start with a non-pathogenic Escherichia coli (or E. coli for short) and repeatedly mutate it and use it to infect silkworms, an insect that is often used as a model for infectious diseases, and then test whether it will cause death in silkworms.
Through this experiment, the scientists created E. coli strains with a 500-fold increased virulence compared to the original bacterial strain and found that mutations in the gene that code for one specific protein, the "lipopolysaccharide transporter (LPS) transporter," was one of the reasons for the increased virulence. This protein forms a part of the bacterial cell membrane and protects the bacteria from harm. Because of this, the LPS transporter is necessary for E. coli to grow.
The mutations that increased bacterial deadliness appeared to give E. coli resistance against some antibiotics, as well as some antibacterial substances from the silkworms. The reason for this is likely a corresponding increase in the concentration of structures called outer membrane vesicles, which the bacteria release to absorb harmful compounds to prevent them from entering the bacteria and harming them.
Researchers also identified the characteristics of substances that pathogenic strains were resistant to, showing that they were "hydrophobic" (or water-repelling) and positively charged. This fit with the increased amount of outer membrane vesicles, which are hydrophobic and negatively charged, allowing them to hold onto those substances (because, of course, opposite forces attract). The scientists also showed that the mutations occurred in parts of LPS transporter that are directly on the outside of the bacterial membrane. The scientists suspect that this is because these areas are more exposed to the environment, thereby experience more natural selection, and are thereby more susceptible to mutation.
"What we've done here is identify several things about pathogenic bacteria," explains Prof Kaito. "We showed for the first time that mutations to LPS transporter can increase virulence, and we provided evidence for how that virulence actually happens--the mutant bacteria make more outer membrane vesicles." And that's not all, the team also pinpointed specific structural changes to mutated LPS transporter that could explain why virulence is different across bacteria--because each species might have a different structure.
When asked about how his work contributes to scientific understanding and to medicine, Prof Kaito elaborates, "Before our study, it wasn't very clear how bacteria actually evolved properties that made them more harmful, so our study helps clarify this. An understanding of this process means the possibility of creating drugs or other therapy that can keep bacteria from becoming pathogenic, especially if we find more proteins like LPS transporter, where mutations can have such a big effect."
Of course, further studies are needed to explore whether the mutations observed in this study will also increase virulence when the bacteria infect animals bigger than silkworms, like mammals. But this study is definitely the first step toward unraveling the mystery of differences between dangerous and harmless bacteria.
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DEPARTMENT OF DUH OH
Children of academics exhibit more stress
RUHR-UNIVERSITY BOCHUM
Starting university is an exciting phase for everyone. However, children from academic households exhibit significantly more stress during this period than those from non-academic families. A Swiss-German research team has found this out by analysing the hair of female first-year students. Study authors Professor Alex Bertrams from the University of Bern and Dr. Nina Minkley from Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) have concluded that students may be stressed by the fear of jeopardising the social status of their families if they fail their degrees. They published their report in Frontiers of Psychiatry on 5 June 2020.
Stress hormone accumulates in the hair
In stressful situations, the body releases an increased amount of the hormone cortisol, which also reaches growing hair and is stored there if the levels remain high over a lengthy period of time. By analysing the hair, researchers can identify the phases when a person had more stress.
In order to find out whether the stress levels of young people from different family backgrounds differ when they're starting university, the research team recruited a total of 71 test persons. "The only inclusion criteria were that they started their first semester and that they had sufficiently long hair," explains Nina Minkley from the Behavioural Biology and Didactics of Biology research group at RUB. "In the end, this meant that we recruited almost only women, and we decided not to include the few eligible men to avoid falsifying the results."
Strands of hair and questionnaires
The participants supplied the research team with three thin strands of hair each, which were cut off near the scalp. Since a hair grows about one centimetre per month, the researchers examined the latest one and a half centimetres that had grown in the six weeks since the beginning of the semester. In addition, the participants filled out questionnaires in which they provided information about their parents' educational background. They were also asked about the stress they subjectively perceived.
It emerged that first-year students from academic households where at least one parent had a university degree exhibit higher stress levels than those from non-academic households, even though they didn't differ in other respects. The subjectively perceived stress levels, for example, were the same.
Stress due to impending loss of status
The research team interprets this result as an indication of female students from academic households being under greater pressure, because failing their study would result in a loss of status for them and their families. This is in line with findings in sociological studies, which have shown that children of academics tend to go to university even if their academic performance isn't expected to be successful, based on their school grades. "Children of non-academics, on the other hand, can only win and are therefore probably less stressed," concludes Minkley.
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Original publication
Alex Bertrams, Nina Minkley: Preliminary indications that first semester students from academic households exhibit higher hair cortisol concentrations than their peers from non-academic households, in: Frontiers in Psychiatry 2020, DOI: 10.3389/fpsyt.2020.00580
Trapping the Sun: New thin-film technology uses sustainable components for solar panels
Scientists identify a novel method to create efficient alloy-based solar panels free of toxic metals
DGIST (DAEGU GYEONGBUK INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY)
IMAGE: IN CLOSE PROXIMITY TO OUR HOMES AND LIVES, SOLAR PANELS ARE THE MOST EFFICIENT WHEN THEY ARE INEXPENSIVE AND NON-TOXIC. THE DGIST TEAM PREPARED LAB-SCALE CZTSSE SOLAR CELLS, AND ONE... view more
CREDIT: DGIST
Commercialized thin-film solar panels on the market consist of rare-earth elements like indium and gallium, or highly toxic metals like cadmium. Both of these thin-film solar panel types have their own problems, such as high-cost and problems in use in living places.
A team of scientists from DGIST, led by Dr Jin-Kyu Kang and Dr Dae-Hwan Kim, has been experimenting with solar panels made from cheaper and more abundant elements. Now, they have published the findings of their latest study in Advanced Energy Materials. Dr Kang elaborates on the reasons based on which they chose their materials for the study: "Thin-film solar cells using bronze (Cu-Sn) and brass (Cu-Zn) as base materials are composed of non-toxic earth-abundant materials, and have been studied worldwide because of their low cost, high durability, and sustainability."
However, using these alloys in thin film technology has its own drawbacks. While the theoretical efficiency of these panels matches the efficiencies of top market products, in practice, they tend to underperform drastically. This is because of the formation of various defects in the materials, such as "point" defect, "surface" defect, and "volume" defect, during "annealing" (or the process of heating and cooling to make a CZTSSe film). These defects undermine the current flow, resulting in loss of electricity generated.
Therefore, the scientists wanted to find a way to synthesize the best quality CZTSSe (copper, zinc, tin, sulfur, and selenium) thin films. They played around with the annealing profile, which has a strong effect on the grain size of CZTSSe thin film: the longer the annealing time and higher annealing temperature, the larger the grains, and the lesser the electricity loss.
However, as the annealing temperature and time increase, there is a change in the properties of the CZTSSe thin film due to decomposition. To bypass this issue, the team used a special "liquid-assisted method," which allowed the grains of CZTSSe to grow at a faster rate. This meant that the grains could grow large even at low temperatures, preventing the change in the properties of the CZTSSe thin film.
With this new observation, a significant hurdle has been overcome in the search for low-cost environment-friendly solar energy. Dr Kim concludes, "Our technology has diverse applications, including in electronic devices, household goods, buildings, and vehicles. The best part is that CZTS solar cells are free of the current drawbacks of toxic and rare metals. We can install everywhere we want!"
About Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST)
Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST) is a well-known and respected research institute located in Daegu, Republic of Korea. Established in 2004 by the Korean Government, the main aim of DGIST is to promote national science and technology, as well as to boost the local economy.
With a vision of "Changing the world through convergence", DGIST has undertaken a wide range of research in various fields of science and technology. DGIST has embraced a multidisciplinary approach to research and undertaken intensive studies in some of today's most vital fields. DGIST also has state-of-the-art-infrastructure to enable cutting-edge research in materials science, robotics, cognitive sciences, and communication engineering.
The DGIST team led by Dr Jin-Kyu Kang (front right) and Dr Dae-Hwan Kim (front left) developed a method for producing low cost eco-friendly solar panels with competitive efficiency
About the authors
Dr Jin-Kyu Kang is a principal researcher at the DGIST, Korea since 2005. He received his PhD degree in chemical engineering from POSTECH in 2000. He joined Samsung Electronics, and led the research about low-temperature poly-Si TFT- LCD. His research is focused on developing and characterizing for thin-film solar cells (CIGS, CZTS, DSSC).
Dr Dae-Hwan Kim is a researcher at DGIST and has been a part of the institution since 2005. He received his PhD degree from Department of Chemical Engineering, POSTECH, KOREA in 2002. From 2002, he worked at Samsung Electronics' Semiconductor R&D Business and invented the lean-free MESH capacitor process for 80nm or less scale DRAM. His research interests include oxide thin-film transistors and thin-film solar cells.
Electricity price more volatile during uncertainty periods in renewable energy regulation
A study by the UPV/EHU-University of the Basque Country analyses the evolution in the price of electricity over a 16-year-period to establish the factors that affect volatility
UNIVERSITY OF THE BASQUE COUNTRY
IMAGE: THIS IS AITOR CIARRETA-ANTUÑANO, LEAD RESEARCHER IN THE BIRTE RESEARCH GROUP. view more
CREDIT: UPV/EHU
Three members of the BiRTE research group at the UPV/EHU's Faculty of Economics and Business have published an analysis of the evolution in electricity prices during a 16-year period (2002 to 2017); the article appears in Energy Economics, a journal positioned in the first decile in the field of Economics. The study set out to see how various factors linked to renewable energy affect the price of electricity. As a starting point, "the incorporating of this energy is known to exert a dual effect: firstly, it lowers the price, in other words, the energy that is transacted is cheaper, because renewable energy has a unit cost of production very close to zero. Secondly, however, it increases price volatility, fluctuations that occur in the price, because as it is an intermittent energy, availability and therefore generation cannot always be guaranteed", explained Aitor Ciarreta-Antuñano, lead researcher in the BiRTE research group and co-author of this publication.
However, the authors wanted to go one step further in the analysis of volatility and incorporate into the analysis the influence exerted by the regulatory framework, the policies that govern the setting up of renewable energy plants and the grants used to provide them with incentives. "The regulatory framework is crucial in the electricity market and, what is more, is greatly influenced by European directives. We wanted to see whether the periods in which there was uncertainty in this aspect have influenced the volatility of the price of electricity," said Ciarreta. To do this "we built a statistical model with the data on the electricity prices of the Spanish market that included the data on a 16-year period", to be able to see on the basis of which indicators volatility varied.
Increased volatility associated with regulatory uncertainty
The statistical analysis of the data revealed "a grouping or cluster of volatility in the specific period in which there was uncertainty in the regulatory framework in Spain". In the period analysed, from 2002 to 2017, the researcher highlights the differentiation of "phases in which there is a very stable regulatory framework, such as that which occurred between 2007 and 2012, when direct grants were awarded to generate renewable electrical power. However, in 2012, there was a change in the regulations which did not settle down until 2014 and these two years of regulatory uncertainty coincide with the period that saw the highest level of volatility in electricity prices, which has nothing to do with the fact that renewable energies lead to a certain volatility owing to their intermittent nature. Economic players are disrupted most by the uncertainty associated with regulatory policies", stressed the PhD-holder in Economics.
The period of regulatory uncertainty described was caused by various factors, as Ciarreta described. "From 2010 onwards the economic crisis also reached the electricity market and this crisis was accentuated by the high deficit growth occurring during the previous period, in which the degree of funding of renewables was regulated so that it ended up accounting for nearly 3% of GDP. The European Union was also putting pressure on Spain to control that deficit."
Faced with this situation, the government tried to put together a new system designed to promote renewable energies because Spain also had to meet the aims on reducing CO2 emissions. It took the country two years to establish the new system and when it was implemented uncertainty returned to the markets. "The rate of return offered by the new regulatory system was lower, and one may more or less agree with what had been established, but we can see that this did not affect the volatility of the price of electricity, uncertainty affects it much more. Investors derive more security from knowing what they have to comply with," said the researcher. And at the end of the day, citizens, too, are affected, because most of us are paying rates that depend on the daily market price", he added.
The researcher believes that the results obtained in this analysis should serve "as a wake-up call for regulators, so that they do not adopt measures to change regulations hastily, and that regulation should be kept as stable as possible. And if they make any changes, they should allow the players to react in such a way that uncertainty is not incorporated in electricity markets".
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Additional information
Aitor Ciarreta-Antuñano is a member of the Department of Foundations of Economic Analysis II at the UPV/EHU's Faculty of Economics and Business. He is the lead researcher in the BiRTE research group that pursues a line of research devoted to energy markets and electricity markets in particular. The other two co-authors of the research work published in the journal Energy Economics are Cristina Pizarro (Department of Foundations of Economic Analysis II and BC3) and Ainhoa Zarraga, from the Department of Applied Economics III (Econometrics and Statistics).
