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Want to accelerate software development at your company? See how we can help.
Want to accelerate software development at your company? See how we can help.




Want to accelerate software development at your company? See how we can help.
Want to accelerate software development at your company? See how we can help.

Firms are exploring sodium batteries as an alternative to lithium - The Economist   

They power tiny phones and two-tonne electric cars. They form the guts of a growing number of grid-storage systems that smooth the flow of electricity from wind and solar power stations. Without them, the electrification needed to avoid the worst effects of global warming would be unimaginable. And in 2019 they earned three of their pioneers a Nobel prize.

But lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries have downsides. Lithium is scarce, for one. And the best Li-ion batteries, those with layered-oxide cathodes, also require cobalt and nickel. These metals are scarce, too—and cobalt is also problematic because a lot of it is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where working conditions leave much to be desired. A second sort of Li-ion battery, a so-called polyanionic design that uses lithium iron phosphate (LFP), does not need nickel or cobalt. But such batteries cannot store as much energy per kilogram as layered-oxide ones.

A clutch of companies, though, think they have an alternative: making batteries with sodium instead. Unlike lithium, sodium is abundant: it makes up most of the salt in the oceans. And chemists have found that layered-oxide cathodes which use sodium rather than lithium can get by without cobalt or nickel to jazz them up. The idea of making sodium-ion (or Na-ion) batteries at scale is therefore gaining traction. Engineers are tweaking designs. Factories, particularly in China, are springing up. For the first time since the Li-ion revolution began, lithium’s place on the electrochemical pedestal is being challenged.

Continued here




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Wildlife Poop Is the Climate Solution You’ve Never Heard Of - Scientific American   

Looking across the Serengeti at herds of honking wildebeest, most of us would be awed by the exuberance of these migrating masses, resplendent in their magnitude. Not Joe Roman. The conservation biologist sees a vital distribution network that flows through the bodies of all those grazers, dispensing valuable mineral resources across ecosystems. To put it another way, Roman sees dumped feces and rotting carcasses.

In the same way that trees function as Earth's lungs, migrating animals—eating, pooping and dying along the way—circulate nitrogen and phosphorus from deep-sea gorges to mountain peaks and from the poles to the tropics. These elements form the basic building blocks of DNA and help to power our cells. “Animals are the beating heart of the planet,” Roman tells us. This becomes evident at the start of the book, when he visits the island of Surtsey off the coast of Iceland.

Surtsey was formed by a volcanic explosion in 1963, making the island younger than most of the scientists studying it. This fresh land offered an opportunity to document how animals build an ecosystem, poop by poop. The pioneers are the seabirds, whose fishy guano provides a nutritive anchor for air and seaborne seeds. Their feathers harbor invasive invertebrates, which in turn attract insect-eating birds. Then come the gray seals, whose fecal plumes generate green algal blooms that can be seen from space.

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