As the United States races toward its target of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, innovative methods to reduce the significant carbon dioxide emissions from electric power and industrial sectors are critical. Mohammad Asadi, assistant professor of chemical engineering at Illinois Tech, spearheaded this groundbreaking research.

“Making renewable chemical manufacturing is really important,” says Asadi. “It’s the best way to close the carbon cycle without losing the chemicals we currently use daily.”

What sets Asadi’s electrolyzer apart is its unique catalytic system. It uses inexpensive, readily available materials to produce tri-carbon molecules — fundamental building blocks for fuels like propane, which is used for purposes ranging from home heating to aviation.

To ensure a deep understanding of the catalyst’s operations, the team employed a combination of experimental and computational methods. This rigorous approach illuminated the crucial elements influencing the catalyst’s reaction activity, selectivity, and stability.

A distinctive feature of this technology, lending to its commercial viability, is the implementation of a flow electrolyzer. This design permits continuous propane production, sidestepping the pitfalls of the more conventional batch processing methods.

“Designing and engineering this laboratory-scale flow electrolyzer prototype has demonstrated Illinois Tech’s commitment to creating innovative technologies. Optimizing and scaling up this prototype will be an important step toward producing a sustainable, economically viable, and energy-efficient carbon capture and utilization process,” says Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy Program Director Jack Lewnard.

This innovation is not Asadi’s first venture into sustainable energy. He previously adapted a version of this catalyst to produce ethanol by harnessing carbon dioxide from industrial waste gas. Recognizing the potential of the green propane technology, Asadi has collaborated with global propane distributor SHV Energy to further scale and disseminate the system.

“This is an exciting development which opens up a new e-fuel pathway to on-purpose propane production for the benefit of global users of this essential fuel,” says Keith Simons, head of research and development for sustainable fuels at SHV Energy.

Illinois Tech Duchossois Leadership Professor and Professor of Physics Carlo Segre, University of Pennsylvania Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Andrew Rappe, and University of Illinois Chicago Professor Reza Shahbazian-Yassar contributed to this work. Mohammadreza Esmaeilirad (Ph.D. CHE ’22) was a lead author on the paper.

Detecting and quantifying the chirality of matter however has been difficult. Current methods using a form of light that produces a (right- or left-twisting) helix have the problem that each turn of the helix is much larger than the molecules. This creates important challenges for detecting molecular chirality.

Now, researchers at Imperial College London, with collaborators in Germany and Spain, have come up with a new way to use light to detect chirality. Instead of making light helix in space, they have devised a way to make it helix in time using lasers with moderate intensities. This form of light drives chiral electronic currents inside the molecules, causing one version of the molecule to emit bright light while its counterpart remains dark, vastly improving detection ability.

The team’s simulations show this would not require particularly intense lasers, opening the possibility of non-destructive imaging of molecular chirality. The team now plan to put the theory into practice, collaborating with other physicists at Imperial to use femtosecond laser facilities to image and manipulate chiral molecules.

In a study publishing in JAMA Network Open on Aug. 18, 2023, researchers led by UC San Francisco concluded that the United States health system is poorly equipped to serve patients living solo with cognitive decline, a group whose numbers are predicted to swell as the population ages.

For these patients, living alone is a social determinant of health with an impact as profound as poverty, racism and low education, said first author Elena Portacolone, PhD, MBA, MPH, of the UCSF Institute for Health and Aging and the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies.

In this qualitative study, researchers interviewed 76 health care providers, including physicians, nurses, social workers, case workers, home care aides and others. Participants worked in memory clinics, home care services and social services and other places in California, Michigan and Texas

The providers raised concerns about patients missing medical appointments, failing to respond to follow-up phone calls from the doctor’s office and forgetting why appointments were made, leaving them vulnerable to falling off the radar. “We don’t necessarily have the staff to really try to reach out to them,” said a physician in one interview.

Discharging a patient is like ‘sending a kid out to play on freeway’

Some patients could not assist their doctor with missing information on their chart, leaving the providers uncertain about the pace of their patient’s decline. Many had no names listed as emergency contacts, “not a family member, not even a friend to rely on in case of a crisis,” according to a case manager.

These patients were at risk for untreated medical conditions, self-neglect, malnutrition and falls, according to the providers. A house service coordinator also noted that calls to Adult Protective Services were sometimes dismissed until a patient’s situation became very serious.

One consequence of the shaky infrastructure supporting these patients was that they were not identified until they were sent to a hospital following a crisis, like a fall or reaction to medication mismanagement. Some were discharged without a support system in place. In one case, a patient was sent home with a taxi voucher, a situation that a psychiatrist likened to “sending a kid out to play on the freeway.”

These findings are an indictment of our health care system, which fails to provide subsidized home care aides for all but the lowest-income patients, said Portacolone.

“In the United States, an estimated 79% of people with cognitive decline have an income that is not low enough to make them eligible for Medicaid subsidized home care aides in long-term care,” she said, adding that the threshold for a person living alone in California is $20,121 per year.

While Medicare is available to adults over 65, subsidized aides are generally only provided after acute episodes, like hospitalizations, for fixed hours and for limited durations, she said.

“Most patients need to pay out-of-pocket and since cognitive impairment can last for decades, it is unsustainable for most people. Aides that are available via Medicaid are very poorly paid and usually receive limited training in caring for older adults with cognitive impairment,” she added.

Subsidized home care aides plentiful in Europe, Japan, Canada

In contrast, subsidized home care aides are generally available to a significantly larger percentage of their counterparts living in parts of Europe, Japan and Canada, said Portacolone, citing a 2021 review of 13 countries, of which she was the senior author.

The study’s findings illustrate substantial deficiencies in how our health system provides for people with dementia, said senior author Kenneth E. Covinsky, MD, MPH, of the UCSF Division of Geriatrics. “In an era when Medicare is going to spend millions of dollars for newly approved drugs with very marginal benefits, we need to remember that Medicare and other payers refuse to pay far less money to provide necessary supports for vulnerable people with dementia.”

The researchers advocate for a system in which robust supports are made available by funding from an expanded Medicare and Medicaid. This will become increasingly critical, said Portacolone, “because effective treatments to reverse the course of cognitive impairment are unavailable, childlessness and divorce are common, and older adults are projected to live longer and often alone.”

“It’s really exciting to get an idea of what people were making in these cauldrons so long ago,” says Shevan Wilkin of the University of Zurich. “This is the first evidence we have of preserved proteins of a feast — it’s a big cauldron. They were obviously making large meals, not just for individual families.”

Scientists have known that the fats preserved in ancient pottery and the proteins from dental calculus — the hard mineralized plaque deposits on the teeth — contain traces of the proteins ancient people consumed during their lives. Now, this study combines protein analysis with archaeology to explore specific details about the meals cooked in these particular vessels. Many metal alloys have antimicrobial properties, which is why the proteins have been preserved so well on the cauldrons. The microbes in dirt that would normally degrade proteins on surfaces such as ceramic and stone are held at bay on metal alloys.

“We have already established that people at the time most likely drank a soupy beer, but we did not know what was included on the main menu,” says Viktor Trifonov of the Institute for the History of Material Culture.

The researchers collected eight residue samples from seven cauldrons that were recovered from burial sites in the Caucasus region. This region sits between the Caspian and Black Seas spanning from Southwestern Russia to Turkey and includes the present-day countries Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. They successfully retrieved proteins from blood, muscle tissue, and milk. One of these proteins, heat shock protein beta-1, indicates that the cauldrons were used to cook deer or bovine (cows, yaks, or water buffalo) tissues. Milk proteins from either sheep or goats were also recovered, indicating that the cauldrons were used to prepare dairy.

Radiocarbon dating allowed the researchers to specifically pinpoint that the cauldrons could have been used between 3520-3350 BCE. This means that these vessels are more than 3,000 years older than any vessels that have been analyzed before. “It was a tiny sample of soot from the surface of the cauldron,” says Trifonov. “Maykop bronze cauldrons of the fourth millennium BC are a rare and expensive item, a hereditary symbol belonging to the social elite.”

Although the cauldrons show signs of wear and tear from use, they also show signs of extensive repair. This suggests that they were valuable, requiring great skill to make and acting as important symbols of wealth or social position — perhaps a little like Le Creuset or Mauviel saucepans today.

The researchers would like to explore similarities and differences in the residues from a wider range of vessel types. “We would like to get a better idea of what people across this ancient steppe were doing and how food preparation differed from region to region and throughout time,” says Wilkin. Since cuisine is such an important part of culture, studies like this one may also help us to understand the cultural connections between different regions.

The methods used in this study have shown that there is great potential for this new approach. “If proteins are preserved on these vessels, there is a good chance they are preserved on a wide range of other prehistoric metal artifacts,” says Wilkin. “We still have a lot to learn, but this opens up the field in a really dramatic way.”

“Meeting the US 2050 net-zero emissions target requires a rapid and cost-effective low-carbon transition across the entire energy system,” writes the team of energy technology experts based at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and energy consultants. “Commercial and residential buildings are a primary source of emissions and are key to this transition.”

In the United States, the authors cite, buildings — including both public buildings, like offices, and private buildings, like homes — contribute 35% of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions. In 2005, the US contributed 2,327 megatons of carbon dioxide in the buildings sector, setting a record for all-time high emissions. Since then, emissions have declined by 25%, and are projected to keep declining by up to another 41% by 2050. But we will need to keep cutting emissions to reach our climate goals, assert the authors.

For their analysis, the authorship team defines three main ways to cut building-related emissions. They argue that we should focus on making buildings use energy more efficiently, making the power grid more reliable by increasing the flexibility of how energy is managed by the grid, and utilizing low-carbon energy sources. “There are no ‘silver bullet’ solutions for building decarbonization,” write the authors. “Achieving deeper levels of emissions reductions will require a comprehensive mix of solutions addressing both the generation and end uses of energy — a true ‘all-of-the-above’ menu of solutions to decarbonize the built environment.”

The team modeled “low,” “moderate,” and “aggressive” scenarios of this “all-of-the-above menu” to determine the degree to which we can cut emissions. They found that it’s possible to reduce building emissions by 91% compared to 2005 levels by 2050, and that demand-side measures that increase the flexibility of the power grid, like heat pumps and smart thermostats, could contribute up to 45% of these emissions cuts.

“Flexibility will play an increasingly important role as variable renewable energy accounts for a larger share of power generation and distribution networks are challenged by growing demand for clean electricity,” write the researchers.

However, achieving this level of emissions cuts would require the “aggressive” level of intervention from the researchers’ model, and the authors emphasize that an “unprecedented scale and speed of building technology development and deployment” would be necessary, as well as a largescale commitment to changing how we consume energy.

“Realizing this level of change in the building sector will require a rapid and sustained increase in investment alongside policy and regulatory support,” write the authors. “We hope that this study can inform concrete policy approaches that accelerate energy system decarbonization across both demand- and supply-side technologies to fulfill ambitious targets for climate change mitigation in the US.”