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, January 01, 2021
Afghan dairy entrepreneur walks political tightrope to stay afloat
Issued on: 01/01/2021 -
The Milko factory in Afghanistan's Kandahar province has to tread a careful line with both the Taliban and government officials WAKIL KOHSAR AFP
Arghandab (Afghanistan) (AFP)
Brightly coloured milk bottles whizz off the production line at the Milko factory in Afghanistan's Kandahar province, the result of entrepreneur Ghami Mia treading a careful line with both the Taliban and government officials.
To keep Milko afloat, Mia has become adept at skillfully pleasing the warring rivals, which are preparing to restart peace talks next week in Qatar.
People from both sides want a share of his success.
"The Taliban only take their taxes, but the government take taxes and also our products," he explains.
The company's dairy products including flavoured milk drinks and ice creams have become well-loved throughout the region.
The company supplies some of the most dangerous towns in southern Afghanistan, such as Zabol, Ghazni and Lashkar Gah, encircled by Taliban territory.
With his clean-shaven face and affable smile, Mia says he just a pragmatic businessman who does what he needs to to make the company thrive.
"I want to continue living in Afghanistan, and working here. I don't want to go and invest abroad," he argues.
At war for 40 years, Afghanistan regularly ranks as one of the most corrupt countries in the world.
Khan, a delivery driver for the dairy who goes by one name, says the local police are his biggest hurdle.
"They ask me for money... and if I don't have any, they want my goods," he explains.
Despite also contending with a lack of electricity and skilled labour, the owner has managed to grow the business employing hundreds of people and offering more than 30 products, using 250 of its own cows as well as relying on farmers in rural areas.
In Arghandab district, farmers line up to drop off their fresh milk at a Milko collection point, an opportunity that has substantially boosted the income of many.
"If the situation persists, we will be forced to close," Mia says.
"But I don't want to let the farmers down."
Belarus charges independent journalists with tax evasion
Four independent journalists who have been critical of President Alexander Lukashenko face seven years in prison on charges of "large-scale tax evasion." Journalists have been detained 477 times this year in Belarus.
Protesters have taken to the streets of Belarus since the election in August 2020 they say was rigged
Four staff at an independent Belarusian press association have been charged with tax evasion, a lawyer for the group's founder said Thursday.
Yulia Slutskaya, a journalist who founded the Belarusian Press Club in 2016, has been charged with "large-scale tax evasion," her lawyer Anton Gashinsky told AFP news agency. She will remain in pretrial detention until February 23.
Slutskaya is also a member of the board of the Belarus Association of Journalists (BAJ). She was detained last week when she returned to Belarus from holiday abroad.
The press club's director Sergei Olshevsky, program director Alla Sharko and Slutskaya's son Pyotr Slutsky have all been charged as co-conspirators. They face up to seven years in prison. Months of protests
The former Soviet state has been gripped with protests since August. Opposition protesters say Alexander Lukashenko, who claimed victory in the presidential election and who has held power for 26 years, rigged the election.
Mogens Blicher Bjerregard of the European Federation of Journalists called on the European Union to "react vigorously" and help secure the release of Slutskaya and her colleagues.
The EU sanctioned Lukashenko' regime earlier in the year. The UK and Canada bestowed a Media Freedom Award on the BAJ in November for its "perseverance and self-sacrifice in the face of increased targeted crackdowns on media" in Belarus.
Egypt denies policemen were involved in Italian student murder
Egypt's public prosecutor has rejected Italy's claims that five Egyptian police officers were tied to the killing of student Giulio Regeni. The real perpetrator was "unknown," officials said.
Cambridge University graduate Giulio Regeni was in Egypt researching trade unions when he was killed in January 2016
State prosecutor Hamada al-Sawy said that Egypt has no intention of "pursuing a criminal case in the murder, abduction and torture of Giulio Regeni because the perpetrator is unknown."
While investigators will continue to search for the murderer, the prosecution has "ruled out" any charges against the five in connection with the case, he added.
The prosecution did not offer an alternative suspect.
Egypt-Italy relations strained
The 28-year-old Cambridge University graduate was in Egypt researching trade unions when he was kidnapped in January 2016. His mutilated body was later found on the outskirts of Cairo. Regeni had also written articles critical of the Egyptian government under a pen name.
The prosecution said Regeni's parents had immediately collected their son's belongings from his Cairo residence after the announcement of his death, including his laptop. It added that the Italian side had rejected requests to hand over Regeni's laptop for inspection.
The statement also suggested that the unknown perpetrator had deliberately chosen January 25 — the anniversary of Egypt's 2011 Arab Spring uprising — for the killing, in an attempt to frame police for the crime.
The decision came nearly three weeks after Italian prosecutors had said they planned to charge four Egyptian officers over the murder of Regeni.
On December 10, Italian public prosecutor Michele Prestipino told a parliamentary commission in Rome there were "elements of significant proof" implicating Egyptian authorities.
"We are going to ask to begin a criminal action concerning certain members of the Egyptian security services," he said. "We owe it to the memory of Giulio Regeni," he added.
Italy has rejected multiple theories from Egypt, including that Regeni had been working as a spy, or that he was the victim of a criminal gang.
mvb/aw (dpa, AFP)
A late Trump salvo, US rejects UN budget over Israel, Iran
Issued on: 31/12/2020 -
Kelly Craft, seen here in September 2020 has voted against the UN budget in one of her last acts as US ambassador to the world body Patrick Semansky POOL/AFP/File
United Nations (United States) (AFP)
President Donald Trump's outgoing administration on Thursday fired a late salvo against the United Nations by voting against its budget, citing disagreements on Israel and Iran, but it found virtually no international support. Only Israel voted with the United States, with 167 nations in favor, as the General Assembly closed the year by approving the $3.231 billion UN budget for 2021.
Kelly Craft, the US ambassador to the United Nations, voiced objections that the budget would fund a 20th anniversary event for the 2001 UN conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, where the United States walked out in solidarity with Israel over what it said was a fixation by Muslim-majority countries against the Jewish state.
The United States, the biggest funder of the UN, "called for this vote to make clear that we stand by our principles, stand up for what is right and never accept consensus for consensus's sake," Craft said on the General Assembly floor.
"Twenty years on, there remains nothing about the Durban Declaration to celebrate or to endorse. It is poisoned by anti-Semitism and anti-Israel bias," she said.
Israel's ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, said that the Durban conference "will become another meeting demonizing the Jewish state -- it will be used once again to slander us and to launch false accusations of racism against Jewish self-determination."
The General Assembly separately approved a resolution backing follow-up efforts on the Durban conference.
That resolution passed 106-14 with 44 abstentions. The United States and Israel were joined in voting no by Western powers including Britain, France and Germany.
Craft also complained about how the United States received almost no support in the world body in September when it declared that UN sanctions against Iran had come back into force.
The Trump administration said it was triggering UN sanctions due to alleged Iranian violations of a nuclear deal negotiated by former president Barack Obama, but even US allies scoffed at the argument that Washington remained a participant in an accord that Trump had loudly rejected.
"The US doesn't need a cheering section to validate its moral compass," Craft said.
"We don't find comfort based on the number of nations voting with us, particularly when the majority have found themselves in an uncomfortable position of underwriting terrorism, chaos and conflict."
Craft said that the US vote would not change its UN contribution, including 25 percent of peacekeeping expenditures and some $9 billion a year in UN-channelled humanitarian relief.
President-elect Joe Biden is expected to seek a more cooperative relationship with the UN including stopping a US exit from the World Health Organization, which Trump blamed for not doing more to stop Covid-19.
Overcoming a key obstacle in achieving diamond-based electronic and optoelectronic devices, researchers have presented a new way to fabricate micrometer-sized diamonds that can elastically stretch. Elastic diamonds could pave the way for advanced electronics, including semiconductors and quantum information technologies. In addition to being the hardest materials in nature, diamonds have exceptional electronic and photonic properties, featuring both ultrahigh thermal and electric conductivity. Not only would diamond-based electronics dissipate heat more quickly, reducing the need for cooling, they can handle high voltages and do so with greater efficiency than most other materials. Because of a diamond's rigid crystalline structure, practical use of the material in electronic devices has remained a limiting challenge. Subjecting diamond to large amounts of strain, which should alter the material's electronic properties, is one way to potentially overcome these obstacles. However, precisely controlling the strain across amounts of diamond needed for device applications has yet to be fully achieved. Here, Chaoqun Dang and colleagues present an approach for engineering diamond that exhibits uniform elastic strain. In a series of experiments, Dang et al. show how their microfabricated, micrometer-sized, single-crystalline diamond plates can elastically stretch - upwards of 10% - along several different crystallographic directions at room temperature. They could recover their length and shape, following these experiments. What's more, the authors show that this highly controllable elasticity can fundamentally change the diamond's electronic properties, including a near 2 electron volt bandgap reduction.
Stretching diamond for next-generation microelectronics
IMAGE: STRETCHING OF MICROFABRICATED DIAMONDS PAVE WAYS FOR APPLICATIONS IN NEXT-GENERATION MICROELECTRONICS. view more
CREDIT: DANG CHAOQUN / CITY UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG
Diamond is the hardest material in nature. But out of many expectations, it also has great potential as an excellent electronic material. A joint research team led by City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has demonstrated for the first time the large, uniform tensile elastic straining of microfabricated diamond arrays through the nanomechanical approach. Their findings have shown the potential of strained diamonds as prime candidates for advanced functional devices in microelectronics, photonics, and quantum information technologies.
The research was co-led by Dr Lu Yang, Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering (MNE) at CityU and researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT). Their findings have been recently published in the prestigious scientific journal Science, titled "Achieving large uniform tensile elasticity in microfabricated diamond".
"This is the first time showing the extremely large, uniform elasticity of diamond by tensile experiments. Our findings demonstrate the possibility of developing electronic devices through 'deep elastic strain engineering' of microfabricated diamond structures," said Dr Lu.
Diamond: "Mount Everest" of electronic materials
Well known for its hardness, industrial applications of diamonds are usually cutting, drilling, or grinding. But diamond is also considered as a high-performance electronic and photonic material due to its ultra-high thermal conductivity, exceptional electric charge carrier mobility, high breakdown strength and ultra-wide bandgap. Bandgap is a key property in semi-conductor, and wide bandgap allows operation of high-power or high-frequency devices. "That's why diamond can be considered as 'Mount Everest' of electronic materials, possessing all these excellent properties," Dr Lu said.
However, the large bandgap and tight crystal structure of diamond make it difficult to "dope", a common way to modulate the semi-conductors' electronic properties during production, hence hampering the diamond's industrial application in electronic and optoelectronic devices. A potential alternative is by "strain engineering", that is to apply very large lattice strain, to change the electronic band structure and associated functional properties. But it was considered as "impossible" for diamond due to its extremely high hardness.
Then in 2018, Dr Lu and his collaborators discovered that, surprisingly, nanoscale diamond can be elastically bent with unexpected large local strain. This discovery suggests the change of physical properties in diamond through elastic strain engineering can be possible. Based on this, the latest study showed how this phenomenon can be utilized for developing functional diamond devices.
Uniform tensile straining across the sample
The team firstly microfabricated single-crystalline diamond samples from a solid diamond single crystals. The samples were in bridge-like shape - about one micrometre long and 300 nanometres wide, with both ends wider for gripping (See image: Tensile straining of diamond bridges). The diamond bridges were then uniaxially stretched in a well-controlled manner within an electron microscope. Under cycles of continuous and controllable loading-unloading of quantitative tensile tests, the diamond bridges demonstrated a highly uniform, large elastic deformation of about 7.5% strain across the whole gauge section of the specimen, rather than deforming at a localized area in bending. And they recovered their original shape after unloading.
By further optimizing the sample geometry using the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) standard, they achieved a maximum uniform tensile strain of up to 9.7%, which even surpassed the maximum local value in the 2018 study, and was close to the theoretical elastic limit of diamond. More importantly, to demonstrate the strained diamond device concept, the team also realized elastic straining of microfabricated diamond arrays.
Tuning the bandgap by elastic strains
The team then performed density functional theory (DFT) calculations to estimate the impact of elastic straining from 0 to 12% on the diamond's electronic properties. The simulation results indicated that the bandgap of diamond generally decreased as the tensile strain increased, with the largest bandgap reduction rate down from about 5 eV to 3 eV at around 9% strain along a specific crystalline orientation. The team performed an electron energy-loss spectroscopy analysis on a pre-strained diamond sample and verified this bandgap decreasing trend.
Their calculation results also showed that, interestingly, the bandgap could change from indirect to direct with the tensile strains larger than 9% along another crystalline orientation. Direct bandgap in semi-conductor means an electron can directly emit a photon, allowing many optoelectronic applications with higher efficiency.
These findings are an early step in achieving deep elastic strain engineering of microfabricated diamonds. By nanomechanical approach, the team demonstrated that the diamond's band structure can be changed, and more importantly, these changes can be continuous and reversible, allowing different applications, from micro/nanoelectromechanical systems (MEMS/NEMS), strain-engineered transistors, to novel optoelectronic and quantum technologies. "I believe a new era for diamond is ahead of us," said Dr Lu.
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Dr Lu, Dr Alice Hu, who is also from MNE at CityU, Professor Li Ju from MIT and Professor Zhu Jiaqi from HIT are the corresponding authors of the paper. The co-first authors are Dang Chaoqun, PhD graduate, and Dr Chou Jyh-Pin, former postdoctoral fellow from MNE at CityU, Dr Dai Bing from HIT, and Chou Chang-Ti from National Chiao Tung University. Dr Fan Rong and Lin Weitong from CityU are also part of the team. Other collaborating researchers are from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, and Southern University of Science and Technology.
The research at CityU was funded by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
Producing clean water at a lower cost could be on the horizon after researchers from The University of Texas at Austin and Penn State solved a complex problem that has baffled scientists for decades, until now.
Desalination membranes remove salt and other chemicals from water, a process critical to the health of society, cleaning billions of gallons of water for agriculture, energy production and drinking. The idea seems simple -- push salty water through and clean water comes out the other side -- but it contains complex intricacies that scientists are still trying to understand.
The research team, in partnership with DuPont Water Solutions, solved an important aspect of this mystery, opening the door to reduce costs of clean water production. The researchers determined desalination membranes are inconsistent in density and mass distribution, which can hold back their performance. Uniform density at the nanoscale is the key to increasing how much clean water these membranes can create.
"Reverse osmosis membranes are widely used for cleaning water, but there's still a lot we don't know about them," said Manish Kumar, an associate professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at UT Austin, who co-led the research. "We couldn't really say how water moves through them, so all the improvements over the past 40 years have essentially been done in the dark."
CAPTION
Paper co-author Kaitlin Brickey, a Penn State graduate student in chemical engineering, stands in front of the scanning electron microscope that allowed researchers to examine how dense pockets in membranes could hinder efficient water filtration efforts.
CREDIT
Tyler Henderson/Penn State
The findings were published today in Science.
The paper documents an increase in efficiency in the membranes tested by 30%-40%, meaning they can clean more water while using significantly less energy. That could lead to increased access to clean water and lower water bills for individual homes and large users alike.
Reverse osmosis membranes work by applying pressure to the salty feed solution on one side. The minerals stay there while the water passes through. Although more efficient than non-membrane desalination processes, it still takes a large amount of energy, the researchers said, and improving the efficiency of the membranes could reduce that burden.
"Fresh water management is becoming a crucial challenge throughout the world," said Enrique Gomez, a professor of chemical engineering at Penn State who co-led the research. "Shortages, droughts -- with increasing severe weather patterns, it is expected this problem will become even more significant. It's critically important to have clean water availability, especially in low-resource areas."
The National Science Foundation and DuPont, which makes numerous desalination products, funded the research. The seeds were planted when DuPont researchers found that thicker membranes were actually proving to be more permeable. This came as a surprise because the conventional knowledge was that thickness reduces how much water could flow through the membranes.
The team connected with Dow Water Solutions, which is now a part of DuPont, in 2015 at a "water summit" Kumar organized, and they were eager to solve this mystery. The research team, which also includes researchers from Iowa State University, developed 3D reconstructions of the nanoscale membrane structure using state-of-the-art electron microscopes at the Materials Characterization Lab of Penn State. They modeled the path water takes through these membranes to predict how efficiently water could be cleaned based on structure. Greg Foss of the Texas Advanced Computing Center helped visualize these simulations, and most of the calculations were performed on Stampede2, TACC's supercomputer.
CAPTION
The density of filtration membranes, even at the atomic scale, can greatly affect how much clean water can be produced.
Producing clean water at a lower cost could be on the horizon after researchers from The University of Texas at Austin and Penn State solved a complex problem that has baffled scientists for decades, until now. Desalination membranes remove salt and other chemicals from water, a process critical to the health of society, cleaning billions of gallons of water for agriculture, energy production and drinking. The idea seems simple -- push salty water through and clean water comes out the other side -- but it contains complex intricacies that scientists are still trying to understand. The research team, in partnership with DuPont Water Solutions, solved an important aspect of this mystery, opening the door to reduce costs of clean water production. The researchers determined desalination membranes are inconsistent in density and mass distribution, which can hold back their performance. Uniform density at the nanoscale is the key to increasing how much clean water these membranes can create.
Researchers measure, model desalination membranes to maximize flow, clean more water
IMAGE: THIS 3D MODEL OF A POLYMER DESALINATION MEMBRANE SHOWS WATER FLOW -- THE SILVER CHANNELS, MOVING FROM TOP TO BOTTOM -- AVOIDING DENSE SPOTS IN THE MEMBRANE AND SLOWING FLOW. view more
CREDIT: IMAGE BY THE GANAPATHYSUBRAMANIAN RESEARCH GROUP/IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY AND GREGORY FOSS/TEXAS ADVANCED COMPUTING CENTER.
AMES, Iowa - Nature has figured out how to make great membranes.
Biological membranes let the right stuff into cells while keeping the wrong stuff out. And, as researchers noted in a paper just published by the journal Science, they are remarkable and ideal for their job.
But they're not necessarily ideal for high-volume, industrial jobs such as pushing saltwater through a membrane to remove salt and make fresh water for drinking, irrigating crops, watering livestock or creating energy.
Can we learn from those high-performing biological membranes? Can we apply nature's homogenous design strategies to manufactured, polymer membranes? Can we quantify what makes some of those industrial membranes perform better than others?
Researchers from Iowa State University, Penn State University, the University of Texas at Austin, DuPont Water Solutions and Dow Chemical Co. - led by Enrique Gomez of Penn State and Manish Kumar of Texas - have used transmission electron microscopy and 3D computational modeling to look for answers.
Iowa State's Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, the Joseph C. and Elizabeth A. Anderlik Professor in Engineering from the department of mechanical engineering, and Biswajit Khara, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering, contributed their expertise in applied mathematics, high-performance computing and 3D modeling to the project.
The researchers found that creating a uniform membrane density down to the nanoscale of billionths of a meter is crucial for maximizing the performance of reverse-osmosis, water-filtration membranes. Their discovery has just been published online by the journal Science and will be the cover paper of the Jan. 1 print edition.
Working with Penn State's transmission electron microscope measurements of four different polymer membranes used for water desalination, the Iowa State engineers predicted water flow through 3D models of the membranes, allowing detailed comparative analysis of why some membranes performed better than others.
"The simulations were able to tease out that membranes that are more uniform - that have no 'hot spots' - have uniform flow and better performance," Ganapathysubramanian said. "The secret ingredient is less inhomogeneity."
Just take a look at the Science cover image the Iowa State researchers created with assistance from the Texas Advanced Computing Center, said Khara: Red above the membrane shows water under higher pressure and with higher concentrations of salt; the gold, granular, sponge-like structure in the middle shows denser and less-dense areas within the salt-stopping membrane; silver channels show how water flows through; and the blue at the bottom shows water under lower pressure and with lower concentrations of salt.
"You can see huge amounts of variation in the flow characteristics within the 3D membranes," Khara said.
Most telling are the silver lines showing water moving around dense spots in the membrane.
"We're showing how water concentration changes across the membrane." Ganapathysubramanian said of the models which required high-performance computing to solve. "This is beautiful. It has not been done before because such detailed 3D measurements were unavailable, and also because such simulations are non-trivial to perform."
Khara added, "The simulations themselves posed computtional challenges, as the diffusivity within an inhomogeneous membrane can differ by six orders of magnitude"
So, the paper concludes, the key to better desalination membranes is figuring out how to measure and control at very small scales the densities of manufactured membranes. Manufacturing engineers and materials scientists need to make the density uniform throughout the membrane, thus promoting water flow without sacrificing salt removal.
It's one more example of the computational work from Ganapathysubramanian's lab helping to solve a very fundamental yet practical problem.
"These simulations provided a lot of information for figuring out the key to making desalination membranes much more effective," said Ganapathysubramanian, whose work on the project was partly supported by two grants from the National Science Foundation.
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The research team
The project was led by Enrique Gomez, a professor of chemical engineering and materials science and engineering at Penn State University, and Manish Kumar, an associate professor of civil, architectural and environmental engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.
Also, from Iowa State University: Biswajit Khara, Baskar Ganapathysubramanian; from Penn State: Tyler Culp, Kaitlyn Brickey, Michael Geitner, Tawanda Zimudzi, Andrew Zydney; from DuPont Water Solutions: Jeffrey Wilbur, Steve Jons; and from Dow Chemical Co.: Abhishek Roy, Mou Paul.
Controlling the nanoscale structure of membranes is key for clean water, researchers find
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- A desalination membrane acts as a filter for salty water: push the water through the membrane, get clean water suitable for agriculture, energy production and even drinking. The process seems simple enough, but it contains complex intricacies that have baffled scientists for decades -- until now.
Researchers from Penn State, The University of Texas at Austin, Iowa State University, Dow Chemical Company and DuPont Water Solutions published a key finding in understanding how membranes actually filter minerals from water, online today (Dec. 31) in Science. The article will be featured on the print edition's cover, to be issued tomorrow (Jan. 1).
"Despite their use for many years, there is much we don't know about how water filtration membranes work," said Enrique Gomez, professor of chemical engineering and materials science and engineering at Penn State, who led the research. "We found that how you control the density distribution of the membrane itself at the nanoscale is really important for water-production performance."
Co-led by Manish Kumar, associate professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at UT Austin, the team used multimodal electron microscopy, which combines the atomic-scale detailed imaging with techniques that reveal chemical composition, to determine that desalination membranes are inconsistent in density and mass. The researchers mapped the density variations in polymer film in three dimensions with a spatial resolution of approximately one nanometer -- that's less than half the diameter of a DNA strand. According to Gomez, this technological advancement was key in understanding the role of density in membranes.
"You can see how some places are more or less dense in a coffee filter just by your eye," Gomez said. "In filtration membranes, it looks even, but it's not at the nanoscale, and how you control that mass distribution is really important for water-filtration performance."
This was a surprise, Gomez and Kumar said, as it was previously thought that the thicker the membrane, the less water production. Filmtec, now a part of DuPont Water Solutions, which makes numerous desalination products, partnered with the researchers and funded the project because their in-house scientists found that thicker membranes were actually proving to be more permeable.
The researchers found that the thickness does not matter as much as avoiding highly dense nanoscale regions, or "dead zones." In a sense, a more consistent density throughout the membrane is more important than thickness for maximizing water production, according to Gomez.
This understanding could increase membrane efficiency by 30% to 40%, according to the researchers, resulting in more water filtered with less energy -- a potential cost-saving update to current desalination processes.
"Reverse osmosis membranes are so widely used for cleaning water, but there's still a lot we don't know about them," Kumar said. "We couldn't really say how water moves through them, so all the improvements over the last 40 years have essentially been done in the dark."
Reverse osmosis membranes work by applying pressure on one side. The minerals stay there, while the water passes through. While more efficient than non-membrane desalination processes, this still takes an immense amount of energy, the researchers said, but improving the efficiency of the membranes could reduce that burden.
"Freshwater management is becoming a crucial challenge throughout the world," Gomez said. "Shortages, droughts -- with increasing severe weather patterns, it is expected this problem will become even more significant. It's critically important to have clean water available, especially in low resource areas."
The team continues to study the structure of the membranes, as well as the chemical reactions involved in the desalination process. They are also examining how to develop the best membranes for specific materials, such as sustainable yet tough membranes that can prevent the formation of bacterial growth.
"We're continuing to push our techniques with more high-performance materials with the goal of elucidating the crucial factors of efficient filtration," Gomez said.
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Other contributors include first author Tyler E. Culp, Kaitlyn P. Brickey, Michael Geitner and Andrew Zydney, all of whom are affiliated with the Penn State Department of Chemical Engineering; Biswajit Khara and Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, both with the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Iowa State University; Tawanda J. Zimudzi of the Materials Research Institute (MRI) at Penn State; Jeffrey D. Wilbur and Steve Jons, both with DuPont Water Solutions; and Abhishek Roy and Mou Paul, both with Dow Chemical Company. Gomez is also affiliated with MRI. The microscopic work was conducted on electron microscopes in the Materials Characterization Lab in MRI. DuPont and the National Science Foundation funded the research.
COVID-19's impact on cancer prevention and control in Africa
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE
When the COVID-19 pandemic reached Africa, the continent was already struggling to deal with another public health crisis - a growing cancer epidemic characterized by more than one million new cancer cases and nearly 700,000 deaths per year. In a Perspective, Beatrice Wiafe Addai and Wilfred Ngwa discuss the significant challenges COVID-19 imposed on cancer prevention and control in Africa and how the efforts to address these challenges highlight key opportunities where greater investment could improve cancer care globally. At the start of the pandemic, many African governments were forced to rapidly divert already limited medical and healthcare resources away from cancer patients to treat those infected with SARS-CoV-2 and slow the spread of COVID-19. According to the authors, many African countries curtailed or cut cancer prevention activities, including awareness education and outreach, early detection screening, and vaccination, gaps that are likely to persist beyond the COVID-19 era. In addition, closed borders have made the international sharing of hospital-based resources and specialized lab diagnostics nearly impossible. Wiafa and Ngwa argue that, while necessary, this reallocation of critical health resources could lead to an increase in the number of late-stage cancer diagnoses and, thus, mortality across the continent. However, as many African nations have adapted to rise to these challenges, opportunities have also been created, such as cloud-based education and telemedicine, expansion of localized diagnostic capabilities and more efficient radiotherapy administration. The authors suggest that greater investment or policy in these areas could substantially increase access to cancer care worldwide.
For reporters interested in trends, a June 2020 Science Editorial by Norman E. Sharpless, director of the U.S. National Cancer Institute, addressed the likely impact of the pandemic on cancer mortality in the United States. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6497/1290
Countries led by women haven't fared significantly better in the COVID-19 pandemic
IMAGE: DIFFERENCES IN CULTURAL TRAITS BY WOMEN-LED AND MEN-LED COUNTRIES ALONG THE DIMENSIONS EXAMINED IN THE PAPER. view more
CREDIT: WINDSOR ET AL, 2020 (PLOS ONE, CC BY 4.0)
Countries led by women have not fared significantly better in the COVID-19 pandemic than those led by men- it may be just our Western media bias that makes us think they have!
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Article Title: "Gender in the time of COVID-19: Evaluating national leadership and COVID-19 fatalities"
Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
