Lithium-air batteries

New technology lithium-air batteries make them closer to practical application

Lithium-air batteries

Having densities of energy storage, comparable to the energy performance of the liquid fuel, lithium-air (lithium-oxygen) batteries can be a solution that allows owners of electric cars don't worry much about the limits of trip distance on one battery charge. But until now scientists still have to solve a lot of problems, one of which is a layer of lithium peroxide, growing on the electrode surface, which blocks the flow of oxygen, resulting in decreased battery capacity. And finally, scientists have found a method that allows you to avoid this undesirable phenomenon, and this, in turn, will increase the capacity of batteries by five times compared to existing lithium-air and lithium-ion batteries.

Signals of brain activity

Scientists, decoding brain signals in real time, have learned how to define the image visible to the human

Signals of brain activity

Using electrodes embedded in the temporal lobe (temporal lobes) of the brain of people with epilepsy, scientists from the University of Washington managed in real time to decode signals associated with the images shown to these people. Scientists used methods and technologies enabled by the signals of the brain to recognize images of faces of different people, of buildings and other objects, the recognition accuracy exceeded 95 percent. But in practice, these technologies will help to communicate with people who were "locked within his brain" as a result of paralysis, attack or other diseases.

The studies involved volunteers who are being treated at the Medical center Harborview in Seattle. Each of these people was subject to epileptic seizures, this medication treatments has not brought any positive results. Therefore, each patient with their consent during brain surgery have been introduced temporary electrodes, with which the doctors tried to determine the exact location of the origin of epileptic seizures.

The accumulation of solar energy

The structure of the polymeric material

The accumulation of solar energy

 Researchers from mit have developed a new material that is a thin transparent polymeric film, capable of accumulating the solar energy it receives during the day, and release it later as heat as necessary. Due to the small thickness of this material can be applied to any difficult surface, including the surface of garments that will acquire the function of additional heating.

With the help of the new material is partly solved a well-known problem with solar energy is unavailable at night or in bad weather conditions. In most cases this problem is solved by converting solar energy into electrical energy and accumulation of electric energy in batteries. Inside the new material is also similar, only the sun light energy is not converted into electrical energy, and chemical, which may persist for an arbitrarily long time and at no additional cost can be converted into heat.