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Category Archives: Mind Building
Researchers engineer a tougher fiber
North Carolina State University researchers have developed a fiber that combines the elasticity of rubber with the strength of a metal, resulting in a tougher material that could be incorporated into soft robotics, packaging materials or next-generation textiles.
“A good way of explaining the material is to think of rubber bands and metal wires,” says Michael Dickey, corresponding author of a paper on the work and Alcoa Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at NC State.
“A rubber band can stretch very far, but it doesn’t take much force to stretch it,” Dickey says. “A metal wire requires a lot of force to stretch it, but it can’t take much strain — it breaks before you can stretch it very far. Our fibers have the best of both worlds.”
The researchers created fibers consisting of a gallium metal core surrounded by an elastic polymer sheath. When placed under stress, the fiber has the strength of the metal core. But when the metal breaks, the fiber doesn’t fail — the polymer sheath absorbs the strain between the breaks in the metal and transfers the stress back to the metal core. This response is similar to the way human tissue holds together broken bones.
“Every time the metal core breaks it dissipates energy, allowing the fiber to continue to absorb energy as it elongates,” Dickey says. “Instead of snapping in two when stretched, it can stretch up to seven times its original length before failure, while causing many additional breaks in the wire along the way.
“To think of it another way, the fiber won’t snap and drop a heavy weight. Instead, by releasing energy repeatedly through internal breaks, the fiber lowers the weight slowly and steadily.”
In materials, toughness is a material’s ability to absorb energy and deform without breaking. You can think of it as the amount of force a material can absorb as it is deformed over a distance. The new fiber is far tougher than either the metal wire or the polymer sheath on its own.
“There’s a lot of interest in engineering materials to mimic the toughness of skin — and we have developed a fiber that has surpassed the toughness of skin yet is still elastic like skin,” Dickey says.
In addition, the gallium core is conductive — though it loses its conductivity when the internal core breaks. The fibers can also be reused by melting the metal cores back together.
“We used gallium for this proof of concept work, but the fibers could be tuned to alter their mechanical properties, or to retain functionality at higher temperatures, by using different materials in the core and shell,” Dickey says.
“This is only a proof of concept, but it holds a lot of potential. We are interested to see how these fibers could be used in soft robotics or when woven into textiles for various applications.”
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Materials provided by North Carolina State University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Predicting the monsoon a year ahead
With average precipitation of 35 inches per four-month season over an area encompassing most of the Indian subcontinent, the South Asia summer monsoon is intense, only partly understood, and notoriously difficult to predict. Until now, according to findings by Nir Y. Krakauer, a City College of New York civil engineer.
Because of the monsoon’s enormous impact on these sectors, his research is of importance to a range of activities, including agriculture, industry, fishing and hydropower.
A frequent visitor to the region, stretching from Nepal to Sri Lanka, Krakauer has devised a methodology that allows forecasts potentially up to a year in advance. Currently, most predictions are made about two months in advance of the South Asia monsoon season that runs from June to September, but it is not known how far ahead skillful forecasts might be possible.
“People usually use one or two predictors for forecasts,” said the Grove School of Engineering associate professor who is also affiliated with the CCNY-based NOAA-CREST. “Many of these predictors are one or another pattern of sea surface temperatures. My question was how do you find which patterns are important for forecasting the monsoon — the amount of rain and where it will be?”
Unlike other forecasters who use only the sea surface temperature readings from neighboring waters, Krakauer looked at the predictive potential of all the common patterns in the sea surface temperature map. He developed prediction methods using global sea surface temperature and monsoon precipitation data from between 1901 to 1996, and tested the performance of his prediction methods on data from 1997-2017.
“What I found is that two methods seem to do a good job of forecasting the monsoon. I looked at the sea surface temperatures at the beginning of the monsoon, and going back as far as four years before.”
His finding was that, generally, the closer to the beginning of the monsoon season, the more accurate forecasts that are based on sea surface temperature can be. But predictions with some accuracy can be made as far as a year in advance.
Getting a better sense of how much water will be available is particularly important given that the rainfall is getting more intense in South Asia while the total amount remains constant, meaning that more rain is falling in a shorter period. This could be problematic for farmers in the region.
His work in South Asia has been partly supported by USAID, most recently as part of the US-Pakistan Center for Advanced Studies on Water program.
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Materials provided by City College of New York. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Captured carbon dioxide converts into oxalic acid to process rare earth elements
Until now, carbon dioxide has been dumped in oceans or buried underground. Industry has been reluctant to implement carbon dioxide scrubbers in facilities due to cost and footprint.
What if we could not only capture carbon dioxide, but convert it into something useful? S. Komar Kawatra and his students have tackled that challenge, and they’re having some success.
A team lead by Kawatra, a professor of chemical engineering at Michigan Technological University, his PhD students, Sriram Valluri and Victor Claremboux, and undergraduate Sam Root, have designed a carbon dioxide scrubber. They are working on converting the carbon dioxide that they capture into oxalic acid, a naturally occurring chemical in many foods.
Root and Valluri have been invited to present their research at the Society of Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration’s annual meeting in Denver in February.
Oxalic acid is used by industry to leach rare earth elements from ore bodies. The rare earths are used in electronics such as cell phones. Rare earths are not presently produced in the United States; China produces 90 percent or more of the rare earths in the world. By producing oxalic acid domestically, it may be possible to profitably extract rare earth elements in the U.S., which is important for national security, Kawatra said.
How a Carbon Dioxide Scrubber Works
The group installed their carbon dioxide scrubber at the Michigan Tech steam plant, where they are testing with real flue gas at pilot plant scale.
The steam plant produces flue gas that contains eight percent carbon dioxide. The chemical engineers’ scrubber brought the emissions down to four percent and their goal is to reduce it below two percent.
“Below two percent, we are happy,” Kawatra said. “Below one percent, we will be very happy.”
It’s a real possibility. “We’ve already got it down to zero percent in the laboratory,” Valluri noted.
In the steam plant, they tap a sample stream of flue gas from the boiler’s main exhaust line. The flue gas comes out of the burner at 300-350 degrees Fahrenheit. The sample is compressed through a filter that removes particles, then passes through a cooling unit before it enters the bottom of the scrubbing column.
Soda Ash Captures Carbon Dioxide
A sodium carbonate solution is pumped into the top of the 11-foot-tall scrubbing column. The flue gas is bubbled up through the column. As it moves toward the top, the sodium carbonate or soda ash removes much of the carbon dioxide from the gas. Kawatra and his students monitor the amount of carbon dioxide constantly.
“The biggest challenge is a fluctuating ratio of gases in the flue gas,” Valluri said. Team member Root elaborates, “You need a cascade control system that measures the carbon dioxide and manipulates the amount of scrubbing solution accordingly.”
“Our next challenges are, how much can we scale the scrubber up and what can we use the carbon dioxide for,” Valluri says. This ties into Valluri’s and Claremboux’s other research project, the conversion of carbon dioxide to useful products. They have been able to produce oxalic acid from carbon dioxide at laboratory scale.
Tech Alumnus Supports Research
John Simmons, a Michigan Tech alumnus in the Chemical Engineering Academy at Tech and chairman of Carbontec Energy in Bismarck, North Dakota, is supporting Kawatra’s research. He says the savings to industry of this kind of carbon dioxide scrubber is enormous.
The usual method of removing carbon dioxide from emissions uses amines, nitrogen-based chemical compounds that bind the carbon dioxide. But amines cost $20,000 a ton, Simmons said. Carbonates like the soda ash that Kawatra’s team is using cost $200 a ton.
Simmons is excited about the potential for producing a commercial product from the captured carbon dioxide. “I don’t think sequestering it in the ground is a good idea,” he says. “We have to find a way to utilize it commercially.”
The technology, trade-named the “Clearite VI Carbon Dioxide Capture/ Utilization Process,” was patented (Patent No. US7,919,064B2 ) by the inventors, S. Komar Kawatra, Tim Eisele and John Simmons, and assigned to Michigan Tech. Carbontec Energy Corporation, the technology sponsor, is the exclusive world-wide licensee and plans to commercialize the technology through joint ventures and sub-licenses.
Simmons is pleased that Kawatra and his students are conducting a pilot plant study of their scrubber in Michigan Tech’s natural gas fired steam plant. “It was important to test the process under actual emission conditions,” he explains.
Health24.com | Weight-loss surgery may bring a bedroom bonus
Apart from the health benefits that weight-loss surgery can bring, a new study shows it could boost a patient’s sex life.
Even better, that boost may often be a lasting one.
Persistent improvement
After tracking the impact that weight-loss surgery had on the sex life of about 2 000 patients, investigators found that roughly half reported notable improvements in their overall sexual experience as much as five years after surgery.
“We evaluated four aspects of sexual functioning in this study, including frequency of desire, frequency of activity, degree to which physical health limits sexual activity, and satisfaction with sexual life,” explained study author Kristine Steffen.
After comparing pre-surgery reports with post-surgery experiences, she and her colleagues concluded that an “improvement in sexual satisfaction generally persists over five years following surgery in both women and men”.
Steffen is a professor in the department of pharmaceutical sciences in the school of pharmacy at North Dakota State University, in Fargo.
The study participants had an average age of 47, and the majority of them were women. All had their first weight-loss procedure – in most cases a Roux-en-Y gastric bypass – at one of 10 different hospitals across the United States at some point between 2005 and 2009.
Pre-surgical physical limitations
Prior to surgery, all of the patients were severely obese, with an average body mass index approaching 46. Body mass index (BMI) is a measurement based on weight and height. (For example, a person who is 6 feet (1.82m) tall and weighs 339 pounds (153.7kg) has a BMI of 46.)
The investigators did not ask patients whether a poor sex life was a primary motivator for wanting to undergo surgery. However, the team noted that before surgery about 70% of the women and 74% of the men said they were not satisfied with their sex life. About 60% of women and 67% of men also specifically reported having pre-surgical physical limitations when it came to sexual activity.
One year after surgery, about 92% of the patients were subsequently asked about their sexual function during the prior month. Among those who had indicated sexual dissatisfaction pre-surgery, 56% of the women and 49% of the men said things had improved meaningfully.
In turn, about 1 400 patients were tracked for another four more years following surgery. Steffen noted that at that point “there were fewer women who still had improvement in most domains at year five compared to year one, suggesting that not all improvements observed early after surgery are maintained in all patients over time”.
Even so, Steffen said that by the five-year mark, one-third of the women still reported post-surgical improvements in terms of the frequency of their sexual desire and overall sexual activity. Five years out, more than half also said that they had fewer physical health limitations when it came to sexual activity, and more than half still indicated being more satisfied with their sexual life.
Findings not unexpected
As for men, Steffen said that most continued to report sustained improvements in their sex life at the five-year point on all fronts, except in terms of physical health limitations. Still, 68% of men said that such sexual limitations continued to be less of a problem five years out.
Steffen noted that a drop in depressive symptoms seemed to be associated with improvements in sexual function among both men and women. The team did not, however, evaluate the impact surgery may have had on erectile dysfunction, so it remains unclear how much a role that factor may have played.
The findings were published online in the journal JAMA Surgery.
Dr Dana Telem, who co-wrote an accompanying editorial, is an associate professor in the division of minimally invasive surgery at the University of Michigan. She said the findings are not unexpected.
“It is common after bariatric [weight-loss] surgery for patients to feel more energetic and see reductions in weight-related medical conditions that can impact sexual health, even within the first few weeks of surgery,” she explained. “Thus, I am not surprised that for many patients this would also translate into improved sexual function.”
But Telem added that the investigation highlights a somewhat non-traditional angle on the potential benefits of bariatric surgery, which could help to “reduce barriers such as bias and stigma surrounding the operation”.
Image credit: iStock
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Health24.com | Does social media push teens to depression?
Time spent on Instagram, Snapchat or Facebook probably isn’t driving teenagers to depression, a new study contends.
In fact, Canadian researchers found the relationship worked in the opposite direction – teenage girls who were already depressed tended to spend more time on social media, to try to feel better.
A lot of benefits
These findings run counter to a series of recent studies that said teens and young adults were more likely to grow depressed if they used social media more often.
But those studies only looked at adolescents’ depression and social media use at one point in time, taking a single survey “snapshot” that couldn’t assess which factor influences the other, explained Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Center in Santa Barbara, California.
The new study looked at people over time and tried to make sense of their behaviours over time, said Rutledge, who was not involved in the research.
“To me it makes a lot of sense, because we also know that social media can have a lot of benefits,” she said. “With anything, there is positive and negative. Social media is this great big thing, and there are all sorts of ways to use it.”
Beginning in 2017, researchers led by Taylor Heffer from Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, surveyed nearly 600 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders in Ontario once a year for two years. They also conducted annual surveys of more than 1 100 college students for six years, beginning in 2010.
The investigators used a standard questionnaire to measure symptoms of depression. They also asked participants to estimate their average weekday and weekend use of social media, their regular screen time, and the time they spend on non-screen activities like homework or exercise.
Situation more sophisticated
They then looked at each participant’s responses over time, to see how depressive symptoms or social media use changed from one year to another.
Social media use did not predict the development of depression symptoms among school kids or college students, researchers found.
Instead, school-age girls with greater symptoms of depression tended to use more social media over time. The researchers did not find the same association among school-age boys or college students.
“It’s definitely more sophisticated than the prior reports,” said John Piacentini, director of the UCLA Center for Child Anxiety Resilience Education and Support. “I believe it. I think it’s a nice contribution, and it clarifies this question in an important way.”
Rutledge said it could be that girls suffering depression might find solace in Snapchat or Instagram.
“If their offline life is unpleasant, they’re feeling marginalised at school, when you go online and you’re in one of these communities it feels good, because you’re now a valued member of something,” she said. “Maybe they use social media more to connect with people, and if they didn’t, maybe they’d be more isolated.”
Moderation important
It makes sense that children would use social media differently based on their individual characteristics, said Dr Paul Weigle, a child and adolescent psychiatrist in Mansfield Center, Connecticut.
“We need to take a closer look at groups and what makes young people different in their experiences with social media,” he said. For example, teens dealing with depression or anxiety might prefer socialising online because it’s easier to control interactions.
“They can stop and think before they respond,” Weigle said. “They don’t have to worry about changes in their voice or how they appear while they are responding.”
Moderation is important, as it is in all things, he added.
“It can lead to a pattern of avoiding,” Weigle said. “Some depressed youth use social media and other types of screen media as an escape from their real-world problems. When they avoid their real-world problems, these problems tend to grow rather than shrink.”
Feeling inferior
Rutledge suggested parents talk openly with their kids about how they use social media and how they feel, rather than assume Facebook is causing their son or daughter to feel depressed.
“What often happens is that parents are so negative about social media that kids won’t talk to them about it, because they’re afraid they’ll take it away,” Rutledge said, adding that it’s important to understand what’s going on with kids and see how all the pieces fit together.
“It’s possible, on the negative side, they’re looking at all these people whose lives look better than theirs and they’re feeling inferior,” Rutledge said. “Or it’s possible that it’s an escape from the things that are really bothering them. They’re just watching cat videos or watching people on Twitch channels play video games.”
The new study was published recently in the journal Clinical Psychological Science.
Image credit: iStock
Flu vaccine ‘working better for children’
It is 87% effective in two to 17-year-olds against the main flu strain, mid-season data suggests.
Health24.com | Codeine: an opioid threat to kids
Codeine is one of the drugs at the centre of the opioid epidemic affecting adults and teens across the United States.
There are also concerns about its effects on very young children – not addiction, but life-threatening events and deaths due to codeine’s side effects.
Effects vary greatly
Codeine has often been prescribed to kids to ease pain after a surgery like tonsillectomy. It’s also been part of the formula in some prescription and over-the-counter cough syrups that are still available on drugstore shelves in some states. But there’s no evidence that it does anything to stop coughing. Rather, it can make kids drowsy.
In fact, codeine’s effects vary greatly from one child to another. About one-third get no pain relief, while one in 12 has a dangerous reaction, most notably slow or difficult breathing, which, in some cases, has been fatal. This could be because young children metabolise the drug very rapidly and/or because of an undiagnosed breathing condition like sleep apnoea, research suggests.
A spoonful of dark honey
Published reports about codeine’s potential dangers and efforts of groups such as the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) led the US Food and Drug Administration to conclude in 2018 that these drugs should not be prescribed to anyone under age 18. If you happen to have any codeine drugs in your medicine chest, it’s important not to give any of them to a child, even if they seemed to help in the past.
For mild to moderate pain, opt for safer alternatives, such as children’s doses of acetaminophen (Tylenol) or a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory like ibuprofen (Motrin). A spoonful of dark honey is better than over-the-counter cough syrups, and the AAP recommends it for children over age one. For babies and young kids, a teaspoon of agave nectar before bed can help, according to a recent study in JAMA Pediatrics.
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Pop star-turned-vicar the Reverend Richard Coles had clinical depression at the age of 17.
Health24.com | High-fat diets don’t do your gut bacteria any favours
Has a high-fat meal ever left you feeling bloated and sluggish? It turns out that a heavier fat diet may keep the many bacteria that live in your digestive system from doing their best, too.
New research found that when people boosted their fat intake to 40% of their daily diet for six months, the number of “good” gut bacteria decreased while amounts of “unhelpful” bacteria increased.
Increase in inflammatory triggers
“The [study] result showed that a high-fat diet is linked to unfavourable changes in the type and numbers of gut bacteria – collectively known as the microbiome,” said the study’s senior author, Duo Li. He is chief professor of nutrition at the Institute of Nutrition and Health at Qingdao University in Qingdao, China.
In addition to changing the make-up of the microbiome, the study authors also noted an increase in inflammatory triggers in the body. These changes may contribute to the development of metabolic disorders, such as diabetes and heart disease, the researchers noted.
Nutritionist Samantha Heller, from NYU Langone Health in New York City, said bacteria living in the digestive system appear to have broad-ranging impacts on human health, and that they “eat what we eat”.
“Research suggests that they thrive on plant fibres – such as those found in fruits and vegetables, legumes, nuts and grains – and that the typical Western diet, which is rich in fat, red and processed meats, cheese, sweets, refined grains and fast-fried junk foods, in a sense, poisons them,” she explained.
In China, where the study was done, a traditional diet has been low in fat and high in carbohydrates. That, however, has been shifting to a diet higher in fat and lower in carbohydrates. At the same time, the rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes have also been rising, the study authors said.
Altered carbohydrate intake
To see if changes occur in the gut microbiome when people transition from a low-fat diet to a higher-fat diet, the researchers recruited about 200 young people, who weren’t obese, for the study. Their average age was about 23 years old.
Li said their average fat intake before the start of the study was about 31%.
The study volunteers were randomly placed into one of three groups for six months. One group ate a diet comprised of 20% fat, another ate 30% of their daily calories from fat, while the third had a 40% fat diet.
The researchers altered carbohydrate intake – things like rice and wheat flour – to make up for the changes in fat intake. The amount of fibre and protein in the diets stayed essentially the same.
All three groups had weight loss, but the lowest-fat group lost the most weight and had the greatest reductions in waist circumference, total cholesterol and bad cholesterol. The low-fat diet group also had an increase in gut bacteria that have been linked to lower cholesterol levels.
Those on the higher-fat fare had an increase in a different type of gut bug – one that’s been linked to higher cholesterol levels. Their diet was also associated with “significant” changes in long chain fatty acid metabolism, producing higher levels of chemicals that are thought to trigger inflammation.
Too much of a good thing
Li said the findings may be relevant in developed countries where fat intake is high, but that further research needs to be done to see if similar changes occur in different populations.
“We suggest that fat intake for a general healthy population should not be more than 30% of total energy – at least in Asian populations,” Li said, and added that most fat should come from healthy fats, such as soybean, peanut or olive oil.
Nutritionist Heller said it’s important not to “interpret the findings of this study to suggest that dietary fat is unhealthy. We need to eat fats to be healthy, unsaturated fats in particular.”
But, she added, you can have too much of a good thing. “Fad diets rich in animal fats – such as ‘Keto’ or ‘Paleo’ – over time, are likely to be deleterious to the gut microbiome and subsequently increase the risk of inflammation and chronic diseases,” Heller said.
To keep your microbiome happy and healthy, Heller recommended eating more vegetables, legumes, fruits, grains and nuts, while avoiding processed meats, limiting red meat and cheese, and balancing your intake of fats, carbohydrates and protein.
Results of the study were published online in the journal Gut.
Image credit: iStock
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