Monday, January 11, 2021

Carbon monoxide reduced to valuable liquid fuels

Rice engineers' reactor converts gas directly into acetic acid

RICE UNIVERSITY

HOUSTON - (Jan. 11, 2021) - A sweet new process is making sour more practical.

Rice University engineers are turning carbon monoxide directly into acetic acid -- the widely used chemical agent that gives vinegar its tang -- with a continuous catalytic reactor that can use renewable electricity efficiently to turn out a highly purified product.

The electrochemical process by the labs of chemical and biomolecular engineers Haotian Wang and Thomas Senftle of Rice's Brown School of Engineering resolves issues with previous attempts to reduce carbon monoxide (CO) into acetic acid. Those processes required additional steps to purify the product.

The environmentally friendly reactor uses nanoscale cubes of copper as the primary catalyst along with a unique solid-state electrolyte.

In 150 hours of continuous lab operation, the device produced a solution that was up to 2% acetic acid in water. The acid component was up to 98% pure, far better than that produced through earlier attempts to catalyze CO into liquid fuel.

Details appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Along with vinegar and other foods, acetic acid is used as an antiseptic in medical applications; as a solvent for ink, paint and coatings; and in the production of vinyl acetate, a precursor to common white glue.

The Rice process builds upon the Wang lab's reactor to produce formic acid from carbon dioxide (CO2). That research established an important foundation for Wang, recently named a Packard Fellow, to win a $2 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to continue exploring the conversion of greenhouse gases into liquid fuels.

"We're upgrading the product from a one-carbon chemical, the formic acid, to two-carbon, which is more challenging," Wang said. "People traditionally produce acetic acid in liquid electrolytes, but they still have the issue of low performance as well as separating the product from the electrolyte."

"Acetic acid is typically not synthesized, of course, from CO or CO2," Senftle added. "That's the key here: We're taking waste gases we want to mitigate and turning them into a useful product."

It took a careful coupling between the copper catalyst and solid electrolyte, the latter carried over from the formic acid reactor. "Sometimes copper will produce chemicals along two different pathways," Wang said. "It can reduce CO into acetic acid and alcohols. We engineered copper cubes dominated by one facet that can help this carbon-carbon coupling, with edges that direct the carbon-carbon coupling towards acetic acid instead of other products."

Computational models by Senftle and his team helped refine the cubes' form factor. "We were able to show there are types of edge on the cube, basically more corrugated surfaces, that facilitate breaking certain C-O bonds that steer the products one way or the other," he said. "Having more edge sites favors breaking the right bonds at the right time."

Senftle said the project was a great demonstration of how theory and experiment should mesh. "It's a nice example of engineering on many levels, from integration of the components in a reactor all the way down to the mechanism at the atomistic level," he said. "It fits with the themes of molecular nanotechnology, showing how we can scale it up to real-world devices."

The next step in development of a scalable system is to improve upon the system's stability and further reduce the amount of energy the process requires, Wang said.

Rice graduate students Peng Zhu and Chun-Yen Liu and Chuan Xia, the J. Evans Attwell-Welch Postdoctoral Fellow, are co-lead authors of the paper. Co-authors are Rice research scientist Guanhui Gao, postdoctoral researcher Xiao Zhang and graduate student Yang Xia; former Rice postdoctoral researcher Kun Jiang of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China; and graduate student Yongjiu Lei and Husam Alshareef, a professor of material science and engineering, at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia. Wang and Senftle are assistant professors of chemical and biomolecular engineering.

The NSF and the CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholars Program supported the research.

CAPTION

Rice University engineers have developed a reactor to produce liquid acetic acid directly from carbon monoxide. The reactor uses a catalyst of copper nanocubes and a solid-state electrolyte.

Read the abstract at https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2010868118.

This news release can be found online at https://news.rice.edu/2021/01/11/carbon-monoxide-reduced-to-valuable-liquid-fuels

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.

Related materials:

Water + air + electricity = hydrogen peroxide: http://news.rice.edu/2019/10/10/water-air-electricity-hydrogen-peroxide-2/

Rice reactor turns greenhouse gas into pure liquid fuel: http://news.rice.edu/2019/09/03/rice-reactor-turns-greenhouse-gas-into-pure-liquid-fuel-2/

New catalyst turns pollutant into fuel: http://news.rice.edu/2018/11/09/new-catalyst-turns-pollutant-into-fuel/

Wang named to Forbes 30 Under 30 list: http://news.rice.edu/2019/01/17/wang-named-to-forbes-30-under-30-list/

The Wang Group: https://wang.rice.edu

The Senftle Group: http://senftle.blogs.rice.edu

Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering: https://chbe.rice.edu

George R. Brown School of Engineering: https://engineering.rice.edu

Images for download:

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2021/01/0111_ACETIC-1-web.jpg An electron microscope images shows copper nanocubes used by Rice University engineers to catalyze the transformation of carbon monoxide into acetic acid. (Credit: Wang Group/Senftle Group/Rice University)

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2021/01/0111_ACETIC-2-web.jpg Rice University engineers have developed a reactor to produce liquid acetic acid directly from carbon monoxide. The reactor uses a catalyst of copper nanocubes and a solid-state electrolyte. (Credit: Illustration by Peng Zhu/Rice University)

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2021/01/0111_ACETIC-3-WEB.jpg CAPTION: Haotian Wang. (Credit: Rice University)

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2021/01/0111_ACETIC-4-web-senftle.jpg CAPTION: Thomas Senftle. (Credit: Rice University)

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,978 undergraduates and 3,192 graduate students, Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 1 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal Finance.

New process more efficiently recycles excess CO2 into fuel, study finds

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN, NEWS BUREAU

Research News

IMAGE: ILLINOIS RESEARCHERS ANDREW GEWIRTH, LEFT, AND STEPHANIE CHEN DESIGNED A NEW COPPER-POLYMER ELECTRODE THAT CAN HELP RECYCLE EXCESS CO2 INTO ETHYLENE, A USEFUL CARBON-BASED CHEMICAL THAT CAN BE USED AS... view more

CREDIT: PHOTO BY L. BRIAN STAUFFER

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- For years, researchers have worked to repurpose excess atmospheric carbon dioxide into new chemicals, fuels and other products traditionally made from hydrocarbons harvested from fossil fuels. The recent push to mitigate the climactic effects of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has chemists on their toes to find the most efficient means possible. A new study introduces an electrochemical reaction, enhanced by polymers, to improve CO2-to-ethylene conversion efficiency over previous attempts.

The results of the study led by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign chemistry professor Andrew Gewirth and graduate student Xinyi (Stephanie) Chen are published in the journal Natural Catalysis.

Allowing CO2 gas to flow through a reaction chamber fitted with copper electrodes and an electrolyte solution is the most common method researchers use to convert CO2 to useful carbon-containing chemicals, the study reports.

"Copper metal is highly selective toward the type of carbon that forms ethylene," Gewirth said. "Different electrode materials will produce different chemicals like carbon monoxide instead of ethylene, or a mix of other carbon chemicals. What we have done in this study is to design a new kind of copper electrode that produces almost entirely ethylene."

Previous studies have used other metals and molecular coatings on the electrode to help direct the CO2-reduction reactions, the study reports. However, these coatings are not stable, often break down during the reaction process and fall away from the electrodes. "What we did differently in this study was to combine the copper ions and polymers into a solution, then apply that solution to an electrode, entraining the polymer into the copper," Chen said.

In the lab, the team found that the new polymer-entrained electrodes were less likely to break down and produced more stable chemical intermediates, resulting in more efficient ethylene production. "We were able to convert CO2 to ethylene at a rate of up to 87%, depending on the electrolyte used," Chen said. "That is up from previous reports of conversion rates of about 80% using other types of electrodes."

"With the development of economic sources of electricity, combined with the increased interest in CO2-reduction technology, we see great potential for commercialization of this process," Gewirth said.

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The International Institute for Carbon Neutral Energy Research, Shell's New Energy Research and Technology and the National Science Foundation supported this research.

Gewirth also is affiliated with the Materials Research Laboratory at Illinois.

Editor's notes:

To reach Andrew Gewirth,
call 217-333-8329;
email agewirth@illinois.edu

The paper "Electrochemical CO2-to-ethylene conversion on polyamine-incorporated Cu electrodes" is available online and from the U. of I. News Bureau. DOI: 10.1038/s41929-020-00547-0

Good results for groin hernia operations not performed by doctors in Sierra Leone

KAROLINSKA INSTITUTET

Research News

In countries with a severe shortage of surgeons it is common for some operations to be carried out by medical staff with lower formal qualifications. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, have led an international study on the safety and efficacy of a common surgical procedure. The study, published in JAMA Network Open, shows that inguinal hernia operations performed by associate clinicians at a hospital in Sierra Leone were just as safe and effective as those performed by doctors.

Many Sub-Saharan countries have a desperate shortage of surgeons, and to ensure that as many patients as possible can be treated, some operations are carried out by medical professionals who are not specialists in surgery. Such task sharing is supported by several bodies, including the World Health Organisation.

There are to date few clinical investigations into the safety and effectiveness of task sharing. Now researchers at Karolinska Institutet and, amongst other places, Kamakwie Wesleyan Hospital, Sierra Leone, have compared inguinal hernia operations performed by associate clinicians with those performed by non-specialist medical doctors. In Sierra Leone, medical doctors have no specific training in surgery but routinely perform surgical procedures as part of their regular work.

An estimated 220 million people around the world live with an inguinal hernia, which causes significant suffering and, 40,000 deaths each year. Twenty million inguinal hernia operations are performed every year, making it the most common general surgical procedure in the world, including in low-income countries like Sierra Leone. In Sierra Leone there are fewer than one surgeon per 100,000 population, and task sharing between MDs and associate clinicians is one way to provide general surgery to many people.

The study included 229 men operated on for inguinal hernia between 2017 and 2018 at a district hospital in rural Sierra Leone. The patients were randomly assigned to a doctor or an associate clinician for their surgery and were followed up after two weeks and one year.

The results suggest that task sharing with associate clinicians provides safe and effective surgery for non-life threatening inguinal hernias in countries where there is a shortage of surgeons.

"The study showed that associate clinicians were not inferior to registered doctors when it comes to recurrence, complications, groin pain or patient satisfaction," says the paper's last author Jenny Löfgren, assistant professor at the Department of Molecular Medicine and Surgery, Karolinska Institutet. "There were even fewer cases of recurrence in the patients who had been operated on by associate clinicians compared to the group operated on by MDs. This was an extremely unexpected finding and task sharing appears to be an attractive option that can help the millions of people suffering from inguinal hernia."

The researchers' next step is to develop training programmes for doctors and associate clinicians in order to expand surgical services. Forthcoming studies will be conducted in Sierra Leone and Uganda.

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The study was financed by the Swedish Research Council. Authors Håkon Bolkan, Alex van Duinen and Thomas Ashley are unpaid members of the CapaCare board. There are no other reported conflicts of interest.

Trained medical staff can perform safe, effective hernia surgery

Single blind, randomized clinical trial in Sierra Leone showed that task sharing can expand access to medical care without compromising quality

NORWEGIAN UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

NEWS RELEASE 11-JAN-2021

Research News

IMAGE: TRAINEES GET ON-THE-JOB TRAINING AT MASSANGA HOSPITAL IN SIERRA LEONE. PHOTO: CAPACARE view more
CREDIT: CAPACARE

This approach, called task sharing, is supported by the World Health Organisation, but the practice remains controversial. Now a team of medical researchers from Norway, Sweden, Sierra Leone and the Netherlands shows that groin hernia operations performed by associate clinicians, who are trained medical personnel but not doctors, are just as safe and effective as those performed by doctors. The study has been published in JAMA Network Open.

"The study showed that associate clinicians were not inferior to registered doctors when it comes to recurrence, complications, groin pain or patient satisfaction," said co-authors Håkon A. Bolkan and Alex van Duinen at the Department of Clinical and Molecular Medicine, NTNU.

An estimated 220 million people around the world live with an inguinal hernia, which causes significant suffering and, 40,000 deaths each year.

Twenty million inguinal hernia operations are performed every year, making it the most common general surgical procedure in the world, including in low-income countries like Sierra Leone, where the study was conducted.

Sierra Leone has fewer than one surgeon per 100,000 population. The shortage of surgeons in Sierra Leone means that the country's medical doctors, who have no specific training in surgery, routinely perform surgical procedures as part of their regular work.

Since 2011, the Norwegian non-profit organization CapaCare has worked with the Sierra Leone Ministry of Health and Sanitation and the United Nations Population Fund to address the shortage in surgical care through task sharing. CapaCare offers a three-year training programme for community health officers, after which they can perform basic lifesaving surgeries, such as groin hernia repairs.

CapaCare graduates are called associate clinicians and their education level is between that of a nurse and a doctor.

"There were even fewer cases of recurrence in the patients who had been operated on by associate clinicians compared to the group operated on by medical doctors," Bolkan and van Duinen said. "This was an extremely unexpected finding and task sharing appears to be an attractive option that can help the millions of people suffering from inguinal hernia."

The study was financed by the Swedish Research Council. Authors Håkon Bolkan, Alex van Duinen and Thomas Ashley are unpaid members of the CapaCare board.

Publication: "Outcomes after elective inguinal hernia repair performed by associate clinicians versus medical doctors - a randomized, single blinded non-inferiority trial." Thomas Ashley, Hannah Ashley, Andreas Wladis, Håkon A. Bolkan, Alex J. van Duinen, Jessica H. Beard, Hertta Kalsi, Juuli Palmu, Pär Nordin, Kristina Holm, Michael Ohene-Yeboah, Jenny Löfgren. JAMA Network Open, Many Sub-Saharan countries have a desperate shortage of surgeons, and to ensure that as many patients as possible can be treated, some operations are carried out by medical professionals who are not specialists in surgery.

Training and task sharing as a way to address shortages

An estimated 220 million people around the world live with an inguinal hernia, which causes significant suffering and, 40,000 deaths each year.

CapaCare graduates are called associate clinicians and their education level is between that of a nurse and a doctor.

An unexpected finding

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The study was financed by the Swedish Research Council. Authors Håkon Bolkan, Alex van Duinen and Thomas Ashley are unpaid members of the CapaCare board.

UVA-led team expands power grid planning to improve system resilience

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCE

NEWS RELEASE 11-JAN-2021

Research News

In most animal species, if a major artery is cut off from the heart, the animal will struggle to survive. The same can be said for many of our critical infrastructure systems, such as electric power, water and communications. They are networked systems with vulnerable connections.

This vulnerability was on display in September 2017 when Hurricane Maria wrecked Puerto Rico's electric power grid, leaving almost all of the island's 3.3 million people without electricity. The months-long blackout that followed was the worst in U.S. history.

Claire Trevisan, then a civil and environmental engineering undergraduate student in the Department of Engineering Systems and Environment at the University of Virginia, took note of Puerto Rico's plight. She asked her fourth-year capstone advisor, professor and associate director of the UVA Environmental Resilience Institute Andres Clarens, if they could use her project to study the problem.

Trevisan's capstone became the impetus behind a critical improvement to the energy system optimization models engineers use to plan infrastructure: Integrating impacts of future hurricanes into decisions about how grids are designed. An interdisciplinary team led by UVA Ph.D. student Jeffrey Bennett and including collaborators from North Carolina State University and the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez just published the research in the journal Nature Energy.

Their research demonstrates that modernizing power grids by using more renewable energy sources distributed across the landscape will cost less than repairing hurricane damage to a centralized grid.

Optimization models analyze data to find the cheapest way to deliver power under a set of constraints. Established models already account for costs related to construction, fuels, emissions and resilience -- meaning the system's ability to recover if something disrupts operation -- but the costs of predictable damage from events such as hurricanes, wildfires and floods are not built into existing models.

"In the past, people didn't know how often hurricanes would hit and what kind of damage they would do," Clarens said. "Now we do know those things, and we have the computing power to actually run simulations to say, 'Okay, if we build it this way, how much more is it going to cost your electricity customers?'"

How the grid is configured, or its topology, is integral to the team's research. When the United States was electrified a century ago, the most efficient way to deliver power to customers involved centralized generation plants feeding electricity over a huge network. That was true even with the risk of widespread outages when a main power station or transmission artery was disrupted.

The researchers wanted to examine what happens as grids are gradually redesigned to support more renewable energy sources, which is already underway in much of the country with solar and wind generation. The model can identify the combinations of generation sources that make the most economical sense when you anticipate the cost of hurricane repairs.

"The ability to do this is important because the frequency and severity of storms are increasing as a result of climate change," Clarens said.

Puerto Rico is a good case study to apply the model. The island has been in the path of 13 named storms over the past 25 years. The existing grid architecture remains outdated today, and the system relies on imported fossil fuels, making power expensive. On the other hand, Puerto Rico has abundant solar and wind resources.

One problem in planning, Bennett said, is that government policies such as emissions controls and market conditions -- including decreasing costs of wind and solar energy production and storage -- can create "stranded assets," expensive, built-to-last power plants that end up being retired early because they're no longer economical to run.

Given the large number of policy- and weather-related combinations that could happen in the future, the team needed to run the model on UVA's supercomputer, Rivanna.

"In our study, we simulate the likelihood and intensity of a storm hitting the grid in each five-year time step. The hurricane intensity is used to predict the wind speed and project damage to the electric grid infrastructure," Bennett said.

"The system then builds new infrastructure to be able to meet electricity demand. By considering combinations of hurricane intensities and probabilities, we are then able to project average electricity costs and examine how infrastructure investments vary. Our results show that hurricanes increase electricity costs by 32% based on historical hurricane trends, and more if you consider that storms are increasing in frequency and severity as a result of climate change. Transitioning to renewables and natural gas reduces costs and emissions regardless of hurricane frequency."

Although the research addresses wind damage to the electric power grid brought on by hurricanes, the team's approach can be applied to other weather- and climate-related disasters, Clarens said.

"With this approach to grid decision-making, you can also look at cases like wildfires in the American West and floods in the Midwest," he said. "There are changes to the climate that are impacting our engineered systems. We're trying to develop new tools and new insights that can help us to say, 'Look, the past is not a good model for the future anymore. We need new ways to simulate the future so that we can make the best decisions possible.'"

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A safer, less expensive and fast charging aqueous battery

New anode for aqueous batteries allows use of cheap, plentiful seawater as an electrolyte

UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON

Research News

IMAGE: AN ELECTRIC FAN (TOP LEFT) IS POWERED BY THE PROPOSED ZINC BATTERY; TYPICAL CHARGE/DISCHARGE PROFILES OF ZIBS AT 0.5C (TOP RIGHT); IN-SITU MICROSCOPE SETUP TO IMAGE THE ZINC DEPOSITION DYNAMICS... view more
CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON

Lithium-ion batteries are critical for modern life, from powering our laptops and cell phones to those new holiday toys. But there is a safety risk - the batteries can catch fire.

Zinc-based aqueous batteries avoid the fire hazard by using a water-based electrolyte instead of the conventional chemical solvent. However, uncontrolled dendrite growth limits their ability to provide the high performance and long life needed for practical applications.

Now researchers have reported in Nature Communications that a new 3D zinc-manganese nano-alloy anode has overcome the limitations, resulting in a stable, high-performance, dendrite-free aqueous battery using seawater as the electrolyte.

Xiaonan Shan, co-corresponding author for the work and an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Houston, said the discovery offers promise for energy storage and other applications, including electric vehicles.

"It provides a low-cost, high energy density, stable battery," he said. "It should be of use for reliable, rechargeable batteries."

Shan and UH PhD student Guangxia Feng also developed an in situ optical visualization technique, allowing them to directly observe the reaction dynamics on the anode in real time. "This platform provides us with the capability to directly image the electrode reaction dynamics in situ," Shan said. "This important information provides direct evidence and visualization of the reaction kinetics and helps us to understand phenomena that could not be easily accessed previously."

Testing determined that the novel 3D zinc-manganese nano alloy anode remained stable without degrading throughout 1,000 hours of charge/discharge cycling under high current density (80 mA/cm2).

The anode is the electrode which releases current from a battery, while electrolytes are the medium through which the ionic charge flows between the cathode and anode. Using seawater as the electrolyte rather than highly purified water offers another avenue for lowering battery cost.

Traditional anode materials used in aqueous batteries have been prone to dendrites, tiny growths that can cause the battery to lose power. Shan and his colleagues proposed and demonstrated a strategy to efficiently minimize and suppress dendrite formation in aqueous systems by controlling surface reaction thermodynamics with a zinc alloy and reaction kinetics by a three-dimensional structure.

Shan said researchers at UH and University of Central Florida are currently investigating other metal alloys, in addition to the zinc-manganese alloy.

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In addition to Shan and Feng, researchers on the project include Huajun Tian, Zhao Li, David Fox, Lei Zhai, Akihiro Kushima and co-corresponding author Yang Yang, all with the University of Central Florida; Zhenzhong Yang and Yingge Du, both with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; Maoyu Wang and co-corresponding author Zhenxing Feng, both with Oregon State University; and Hua Zhou with Argonne National Laboratory.

Measurements of pulsar acceleration reveal Milky Way's dark side

INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY

Research News NEWS RELEASE 11-JAN-2021

IMAGE: THE RIPPLES IN THE MILKY WAY DISK ARE SHOWN, ALONG WITH THE TIDAL DEBRIS FROM THE SAGITTARIUS DWARF GALAXY. THE PULSARS ANALYZED BY CHAKRABARTI ET AL 2021 TO CALCULATE... view more
CREDIT: IAS; DANA BERRY

It is well known that the expansion of the universe is accelerating due to a mysterious dark energy. Within galaxies, stars also experience an acceleration, though this is due to some combination of dark matter and the stellar density. In a new study to be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters researchers have now obtained the first direct measurement of the average acceleration taking place within our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Led by Sukanya Chakrabarti at the Institute for Advanced Study with collaborators from Rochester Institute of Technology, University of Rochester, and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the team used pulsar data to clock the radial and vertical accelerations of stars within and outside of the galactic plane. Based on these new high-precision measurements and the known amount of visible matter in the galaxy, researchers were then able to calculate the Milky Way's dark matter density without making the usual assumption that the galaxy is in a steady-state.

"Our analysis not only gives us the first measurement of the tiny accelerations experienced by stars in the galaxy, but also opens up the possibility of extending this work to understand the nature of dark matter, and ultimately dark energy on larger scales," stated Chakrabarti, the paper's lead author and a current Member and IBM Einstein Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Stars hurtle through the galaxy at hundreds of kilometers per second, yet this study indicates that the change in their velocities is occurring at a literal snail's pace--a few centimeters per second, which is about the same speed as a crawling baby. To detect this subtle motion the research team relied on the ultraprecise time-keeping ability of pulsars that are widely distributed throughout the galactic plane and halo--a diffuse spherical region that surrounds the galaxy.

"By exploiting the unique properties of pulsars, we were able to measure very small accelerations in the Galaxy. Our work opens a new window in galactic dynamics," said co-author Philip Chang of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Extending outwards approximately 300,000 light years from the galactic center, the halo may provide important hints to understanding dark matter, which accounts for about 90 percent of the galaxy's mass and is highly concentrated above and below the star-dense galactic plane. Stellar motion in this particular region--a primary focus of this study--can be influenced by dark matter. Utilizing the local density measurements obtained through this study, researchers will now have a better idea of how and where to look for dark matter.

While previous studies assumed a state of galactic equilibrium to calculate average mass density, this research is based on the natural, non-equilibrium state of the galaxy. One might analogize this to the difference between the surface of a pond before and after a stone is tossed in. By accounting for the "ripples" the team was able to obtain a more accurate picture of reality. Though in this case, rather than stones, the Milky Way is influenced by a turbulent history of galactic mergers and continues to be perturbed by external dwarf galaxies like the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds. As a result, stars do not have flat orbits and tend to follow a path similar to that of a warped vinyl record, crossing above and below the galactic plane. One of the key factors that enabled this direct observational approach was the use of pulsar data compiled from international collaborations, including NANOGrav (North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves) that has obtained data from the Green Bank and Arecibo telescopes.

This landmark paper expands upon the work of Jan H. Oort (1932); John Bahcall (1984); Kuijken & Gilmore (1989); Holmberg & Flynn (2000); Jo Bovy & Scott Tremaine (2012) to calculate the average mass density in the galactic plane (Oort limit) and local dark matter density. IAS scholars including Oort, Bahcall, Bovy, Tremaine, and Chakrabarti have played an important role in advancing this area of research.

"For centuries astronomers have measured the positions and speeds of stars, but these provide only a snapshot of the complex dynamical behavior of the Milky Way galaxy," stated Scott Tremaine, Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study. "The accelerations measured by Chakrabarti and her collaborators are directly caused by the gravitational forces from the matter in the galaxy, both visible and dark, and thereby provide a new and promising window on the distribution and the composition of the matter in the galaxy and the universe."

This particular paper will enable a wide variety of future studies. Accurate measurements of accelerations will also soon be possible using the complementary radial velocity method that Chakrabarti developed earlier this year, which measures the change in the velocity of stars with high precision. This work will also enable more detailed simulations of the Milky Way, improve constraints on general relativity, and provide clues in the search for dark matter. Extensions of this method may ultimately allow us to directly measure the cosmic acceleration as well.

While a direct picture of our home galaxy--similar to the ones of Earth taken by the Apollo astronauts--is not yet possible, this study has provided essential new details to help envision the dynamic organization of the galaxy from within.

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About the Institute

The Institute for Advanced Study is one of the world's foremost centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. Located in Princeton, N.J., the IAS is dedicated to independent study across the sciences and humanities. Founded in 1930, the Institute is devoted to advancing the frontiers of knowledge without concern for immediate application. From founding IAS Professor Albert Einstein to the foremost thinkers of today, the IAS enables bold, curiosity-driven innovation to enrich society in unexpected ways.

Each year, the Institute welcomes more than 200 of the world's most promising post-doctoral researchers and scholars who are selected and mentored by a permanent Faculty, each of whom are preeminent leaders in their fields. Among present and past Faculty and Members there have been 35 Nobel Laureates, 42 of the 60 Fields Medalists, and 19 of the 22 Abel Prize Laureates, as well as many MacArthur Fellows and Wolf Prize winners.

Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of new

Simple monitoring could reduce medicine misuse in care homes

Monitoring system could decrease medicine related harm

SWANSEA UNIVERSITY

Research News

New research from Swansea University suggests that a simple nurse- or carer-led medicines' monitoring system can help reduce medication-related illness for people living in residential care homes - and the process takes just a few minutes per patient.

The research paper published in the PLOS ONE journal looked how the monitoring system, known as the Adverse Drug Reaction Profile (ADRe-p), can help nurses or carers identify medicines' mismanagement or adverse drug reactions in patients prescribed multiple medicines, and can help avoid medication-related harm and improve prescribing.

Professor Sue Jordan, who led the study said: "The problem presented by the scale and complexity of inadvertent harm from both use and misuse of medicines is very real, which is reflected in the World Health Organisation's (WHO) Third Global Patient Safety Challenge aiming to reduce avoidable medication-related harm by 50% by next year.

"Our study took place in three independent private sector registered care homes. All the homes were very good, and we witnessed excellent nursing care. Nevertheless, ADRe helped to improve medicines management. Nurses or carers using the ADRe monitoring system identified possible medication-related harms and, following a review by doctors or pharmacists, new medication regimens were introduced.

The outcomes for the 19 patients involved meant that:

6 residents were no longer in pain
3 no longer experienced convulsions
3 no longer experienced aggression
2 had swallowing difficulties treated
4 no longer reported insomnia
1 had breathing difficulties treated
2 had their laxative prescriptions adjusted to reduce diarrhoea
falls ceased for 2 residents (of 4 noted as falling and of 5 able to stand).

The research team also found that few new problems arose, there was no clinical deterioration, and no harms were associated with the intervention.

Professor Jordan said: "What was really important about this study was that it showed that just 10 minutes of nurses' or carers' time, along with 10 minutes for a pharmacist review, made a huge difference to patient wellbeing. The use of ADRe not only improved residents' health, but also changed prescription regimens to ensure the maximum clinical benefits for patients, which ultimately helps to optimize healthcare resources."

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Can a mother's stress impact children's disease development?

University of Cincinnati environmental health researcher says there is a connection between trauma and DNA mutation

UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

Research News

Stress on an expectant mother could affect her baby's chance of developing disease - perhaps even over the course of the child's life, UC researchers have found.

Psychosocial factors creating stress -- such as lack of social support, loneliness, marriage status or bereavement -- may be mutating their child's mitochondrial DNA and could be a precursor to a host of diseases, according to a University of Cincinnati study.

"There are a lot of conditions that start in childhood that have ties to mitochondrial dysfunction including asthma, obesity, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism," says Kelly Brunst, PhD, assistant professor of environmental and public health sciences in the UC College of Medicine and lead author of the study.

"The fetal and infant period is a vulnerable time for environmental exposure due to heightened development during these periods," says Brunst. "We don't just wake up one day and have asthma or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The programming effects resulting from environmentally induced shifts occur over time and likely start during gestation at the molecular and cellular level. These shifts alter physiological states that likely play a role in who is going to go on and develop adverse health outcomes."

As part of the study, researchers sequenced the mitochondrial genome and identified mutations in 365 placenta samples from birth mothers in Boston and New York City from 2013-18. A multivariable regression model was used to look at maternal lifetime stress in relation to the number of gene mutations in the placenta mitochondrial genome.

Women experiencing increased psychosocial stress -- that can range from sexual assault, domestic violence or serious injury to incarceration, physical or mental illness and family hardship -- over their lifetime exhibited a higher number of placental mitochondrial mutations. The strongest associations were observed among Black women. Higher stress-related DNA mutations in the placenta were seen in Black and white women, but not in Hispanic women.

The study's findings were published in the scholarly journal Biological Psychiatry.

"The idea behind this work is about understanding how our environment, in this case maternal stress and trauma, impact mitochondrial function and ultimately neurobehavioral development," says Brunst. "The hope is to gain insight as to why certain children are vulnerable to developing a range of complex conditions previously linked to environmental exposures such as chronic stress or air pollution."

"We ask about events that might have occurred prior to their pregnancy even during the mother's own childhood as part of our study," says Brunst. "So what this is telling us is that the stress that a woman has experienced even before she is pregnant might have an impact on the fetal mitochondrial genome."

Brunst said there are some diseases for which Black women are more at risk -- obesity, diabetes and certain cancers -- so they might be more affected by stress and subsequently develop these diseases which have also been linked to stress."

"What was interesting about the study was that Hispanics exposed to stress had fewer placental mitochondrial DNA mutations," says Brunst.

She says one explanation could be what researchers call the "Hispanic paradox." It is the epidemiological phenomenon documenting better health and lower mortality relative to non-Hispanic whites despite greater risk and lower socioeconomic status for Hispanics."

"Despite exposure to more stress and trauma, sociocultural dynamics specific to Hispanics may attenuate experiences of stress which in turn has downstream effects on psychophysiological mechanisms and better outcomes," says Brunst. "This is just one possible explanation."

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Other co-authors of this study are Xiang Zhang, PhD, and Li Zhang, PhD, both associate professors in the UC College of Medicine, along with Andrea Baccarelli, MD, PhD, and Tessa Bloomquist, both of Columbia University, Mailman School of Public Health, and Rosalind Wright, MD, of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in New York City.

The study was funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute under grants R01HL095606 and R01HL114396; the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences under grants R00ES024116, P30ES006096 and P30ES023515.

Brunst led a previous research study that looked at the correlation between exposure to traffic-related air pollution and childhood anxiety, by looking at the altered neurochemistry in pre-adolescents. She is also recipient of a recent $2.9 million five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health for the research project, "Epigenetics, air pollution, and childhood mental health."

Motherhood does not drive support for gun control

NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY

Research News

Moms are not more likely than other women to support gun control efforts. In fact, a new study finds that parenthood doesn't have a substantial effect on the gun control views of men or women.

"Everybody 'knows' that moms are more politically liberal on gun control issues," says Steven Greene, corresponding author of the study and a professor of political science at North Carolina State University. "We wanted to know if that's actually true. And, as it turns out, it's not true - which was surprising."

To explore the impact of parenthood on people's gun control views, the researchers drew on data collected by the Pew Center for Research in 2017 as part of Pew's nationally representative American Trends Panel. The researchers then used statistical models to account for various confounding variables, such as political affiliation, allowing them to focus specifically on the effect that parenthood has on one's beliefs regarding gun control.

The Pew surveys had examined a range of issues pertaining to gun control. Across the board, men were substantially more politically conservative than women on questions related to gun laws and regulations. In other words, men were more likely to favor fewer regulations and laxer legal requirements when it comes to guns.

On four of the gun control issues, parenthood had no statistical impact at all - meaning that the positions of moms were no different from the positions of women who weren't parents, and the positions of dads were no different from the positions of men who weren't parents. Those four issues pertained to: gun ownership, or how permissive gun ownership laws should be; home safety, or laws pertaining to how guns and ammunition are stored or secured in the home; teachers and guns, or whether school personnel should carry firearms; and whether stricter gun laws would reduce mass shootings.

However, parenthood did have a small - but statistically significant - impact on two other gun control issues.

Mothers were actually more politically conservative than other women on the issue of gun strictness - meaning that moms were slightly more likely to support less restrictive gun laws.

And fathers were more politically conservative than other men on the issue of gun prevalence - meaning they were slightly more likely to believe that more people should be allowed to own guns, and guns should be allowed in more places.

"When we talk about political movements and efforts to change laws, it's important to have a clear, accurate sense of where people stand on the relevant issues," Greene says. "Using the potent symbolism of motherhood in America in order advance a political agenda, in this case, is actually ignoring the fact that positions on gun control are virtually identical for women across the board. There is some minor variation, but even there, it actually suggests that mothers are less supportive of restrictive gun laws.

"To be clear, most women - including most moms - support more restrictive gun laws. But it's not because they're parents."

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The paper, "Do moms demand action on guns? Parenthood and gun policy attitudes," appears in the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties. The paper was co-authored by Melissa Deckman, of Washington College; Laurel Elder, of Hartwick College; and Mary-Kate Lizotte, of Augusta University.

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