“We found that coal can be this geological hydrogen battery,” said Shimin Liu, associate professor of energy and mineral engineering at Penn State. “You could inject and store the hydrogen energy and have it there when you need to use it.”

Hydrogen is a clean burning fuel and shows promise for use in the most energy intensive sectors of our economy — transportation, electricity generation and manufacturing. But much work remains to build a hydrogen infrastructure and make it an affordable and reliable energy source, the scientists said.

This includes developing a way to store hydrogen, which is currently expensive and inefficient. Geologic formations are an intriguing option, the scientists said, because they can store large amounts of hydrogen to meet the peaks and valleys as energy demand changes daily or seasonally.

“Coal is well-studied, and we have been commercially producing gas from coal for almost a half century,” Liu said. “We understand it. We have the infrastructure. I think coal would be the logical place to do geological hydrogen storage.”

To put this to the test, the scientists analyzed eight types of coals from coalfields across the United States to better understand their sorption and diffusion potential, or how much hydrogen they can hold.

All eight coals showed considerable sorption properties, with low-volatile bituminous coal from eastern Virgina and anthracite coal from eastern Pennsylvania performing the best in tests, the scientists reported in the journal Applied Energy.

“I think it’s highly possible that coal could be the very top selection for geological storage from a scientific perspective,” said Liu. “We find that coal outperforms other formations because it can hold more, it has existing infrastructure and is widely available across the country and near populated areas.”

Depleted coalbed methane reservoirs may be the best candidates. These seams contain unconventional natural gas like methane and have become an important source of fossil fuel energy over the last several decades. The methane sticks to the surface of the coal, in a process called adsorption.

Similarly, injecting hydrogen into coal would cause that gas to absorb or stick to the coal. These formations often have a layer of shale or mudstone on top that act as a seal keeping methane, or in this case hydrogen, sealed until it is needed and pumped back out, the scientists said.

“A lot of people define coal as a rock, but it’s really a polymer,” Liu said. “It has high carbon content with a lot of small pores that can store much more gas. So coal is like a sponge that can hold many more hydrogen molecules compared to other non-carbon materials.”

The scientists designed special equipment to conduct the experiments. Coal has a weaker affinity with hydrogen compared to other sorbing gases like methane and carbon dioxide, so traditional pressurized equipment for determining sorption would not have worked.

“We did a very novel and very challenging design,” Liu said. “It took years to figure out how to do this properly. We had to properly design an experiment system, trial and error based on our previous experience with coals and shales.”

Based on their results, the scientists determined anthracite and semi-anthracite coals are good candidates for hydrogen storage in depleted coal seams, and low-volatile bituminous coal are better candidates for gassy coal seams.

Developing hydrogen storage in coal mining communities could bring new economic opportunities to these regions while also helping create the nation’s hydrogen infrastructure.

“In the energy transition, it’s really coal communities that have been the most impacted economically,” Liu said. “This is certainly an opportunity to repurpose the coal region. They already have the expertise — the energy engineer and skills. If we can build an infrastructure and change their economic opportunities — I think that’s something we should consider.”

Future work will focus on the dynamic diffusivity and dynamic permeability of coal, features which determine how quickly hydrogen can be injected and pumped back out, the scientists said.

“I think Penn State is the right place to do all this research — we have the coal reserves, we have natural gas, we have both the engineering and economic expertise at the University,” Liu said. “This is the logical place to do this.”

Also contributing from Penn State was Ang Liu, instructor, John and Willie Leone Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering.

Researchers from the University of Tsukuba have developed and validated a model (“dynamic prospect theory”) that integrates the most popular model in behavioral economics to describe decision-making under uncertainty — prospect theory, and a well-established model of learning from neuroscience — reinforcement learning theory. This model more accurately described the decisions that people and monkeys made while facing risk than prospect theory or reinforcement learning theory alone.

Specifically, the researchers asked 70 people to repeatedly choose between two lotteries in which they could gain some reward with some probability. The lotteries varied in the size of the reward, the probability of receiving it, and the amount of risk involved. The results showed that immediately after experiencing an outcome that was bigger than the expected value of the selected option, participants behaved as if the probability of winning in the next lottery increased. Senior author of the study Assistant Professor Hiroshi Yamada says “This behavior is surprising because winning probabilities were clearly described to the participants (participants did not have to learn them from experience) and these probabilities were also completely independent of previous outcomes.” Using their dynamic prospect theory model, the researchers were able to determine that the change in behavior is driven by a change in the perception of probabilities rather than by a change in valuation of rewards.

Yamada also says: “Such learning from unexpected events underlies reinforcement learning theory and is a well-known algorithm that occurs when people need to learn the rewards from experience. It is interesting that it occurs even if learning is not necessary.”

In similar experiments with macaque monkeys, whose brains closely resemble those of humans, essentially the same results were observed. Researchers commented that the similarity in human and monkey behavior was remarkable in this study.

Based on the results of this research, it is expected that the investigation of the monkey brain will lead to an understanding of the brain mechanisms involved in the perception of rewards and probability that all of us use when making risky decisions, as well as the joy we feel when we succeed.

This study was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP:15H05374 and 21H02797, Takeda Science Foundation, Council for Addiction Behavior Studies, Narishige Neuroscience Research Foundation, Moonshot R&D JPMJMS2294 (H.Y.), and ARC DP190100489 (A.T.).

The analysis, by a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), appears in Communications of the ACM, published by the Association for Computing Machinery.

“People are worried about the risks of granting rights to robots,” notes Tae Wan Kim, Associate Professor of Business Ethics at CMU’s Tepper School of Business, who conducted the analysis. “Granting rights is not the only way to address the moral status of robots: Envisioning robots as rites bearers — not a rights bearers — could work better.”

Although many believe that respecting robots should lead to granting them rights, Kim argues for a different approach. Confucianism, an ancient Chinese belief system, focuses on the social value of achieving harmony; individuals are made distinctively human by their ability to conceive of interests not purely in terms of personal self-interest, but in terms that include a relational and a communal self. This, in turn, requires a unique perspective on rites, with people enhancing themselves morally by participating in proper rituals.

When considering robots, Kim suggests that the Confucian alternative of assigning rites — or what he calls role obligations — to robots is more appropriate than giving robots rights. The concept of rights is often adversarial and competitive, and potential conflict between humans and robots is concerning.

“Assigning role obligations to robots encourages teamwork, which triggers an understanding that fulfilling those obligations should be done harmoniously,” explains Kim. “Artificial intelligence (AI) imitates human intelligence, so for robots to develop as rites bearers, they must be powered by a type of AI that can imitate humans’ capacity to recognize and execute team activities — and a machine can learn that ability in various ways.”

Kim acknowledges that some will question why robots should be treated respectfully in the first place. “To the extent that we make robots in our image, if we don’t treat them well, as entities capable of participating in rites, we degrade ourselves,” he suggests.

Various non-natural entities — such as corporations — are considered people and even assume some Constitutional rights. In addition, humans are not the only species with moral and legal status; in most developed societies, moral and legal considerations preclude researchers from gratuitously using animals for lab experiments.

Published today in the journal Immunity, the OHSU-led study describes how two nonhuman primates were cured of the monkey form of HIV after receiving a stem cell transplant. It also reveals that two circumstances must co-exist for a cure to occur and documents the order in which HIV is cleared from the body — details that can inform efforts to make this cure applicable to more people.

“Five patients have already demonstrated that HIV can be cured,” said the study’s lead researcher, Jonah Sacha, Ph.D., a professor at OHSU’s Oregon National Primate Research Center and Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute.

“This study is helping us home in on the mechanisms involved in making that cure happen,” Sacha continued. “We hope our discoveries will help to make this cure work for anyone, and ideally through a single injection instead of a stem cell transplant.”

The first known case of HIV being cured through a stem cell transplant was reported in 2009. A man who was living with HIV was also diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, a type of cancer, and underwent a stem cell transplant in Berlin, Germany. Stem cell transplants, which are also called bone marrow transplants, are used to treat some forms of cancer. Known as the Berlin patient, he received donated stem cells from someone with a mutated CCR5 gene, which normally codes for a receptor on the surface of white blood cells that HIV uses to infect new cells. A CCR5 mutation makes it difficult for the virus to infect cells, and can make people resistant to HIV. Since the Berlin patient, four more people have been similarly cured.

This study was conducted with a species of nonhuman primate known as Mauritian cynomolgus macaques, which the research team previously demonstrated can successfully receive stem cell transplants. While all of the study’s eight subjects had HIV, four of them underwent a transplant with stem cells from HIV-negative donors, and the other half served as the study’s controls and went without transplants.

Of the four that received transplants, two were cured of HIV after successfully being treated for graft-versus-host disease, which is commonly associated with stem cell transplants.

Other researchers have tried to cure nonhuman primates of HIV using similar methods, but this study marks the first time that HIV-cured research animals have survived long term. Both remain alive and HIV-free today, about four years after transplantation. Sacha attributes their survival to exceptional care from Oregon National Primate Research Center veterinarians and the support of two study coauthors, OHSU clinicians who care for people who undergo stem cell transplants: Richard T. Maziarz, M.D., and Gabrielle Meyers, M.D.

“These results highlight the power of linking human clinical studies with pre-clinical macaque experiments to answer questions that would be almost impossible to do otherwise, as well as demonstrate a path forward to curing human disease,” said Maziarz, a professor of medicine in the OHSU School of Medicine and medical director of the adult blood and marrow stem cell transplant and cellular therapy programs in the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute.

The how behind the cure

Although Sacha said it was gratifying to confirm stem cell transplantation cured the nonhuman primates, he and his fellow scientists also wanted to understand how it worked. While evaluating samples from the subjects, the scientists determined there were two different, but equally important, ways they beat HIV.

First, the transplanted donor stem cells helped kill the recipients’ HIV-infected cells by recognizing them as foreign invaders and attacking them, similar to the process of graft-versus-leukemia that can cure people of cancer.

Second, in the two subjects that were not cured, the virus managed to jump into the transplanted donor cells. A subsequent experiment verified that HIV was able to infect the donor cells while they were attacking HIV. This led the researchers to determine that stopping HIV from using the CCR5 receptor to infect donor cells is also needed for a cure to occur.

The researchers also discovered that HIV was cleared from the subjects’ bodies in a series of steps. First, the scientists saw that HIV was no longer detectable in blood circulating in their arms and legs. Next, they couldn’t find HIV in lymph nodes, or lumps of immune tissue that contain white blood cells and fight infection. Lymph nodes in the limbs were the first to be HIV-free, followed by lymph nodes in the abdomen.

The step-wise fashion by which the scientists observed HIV being cleared could help physicians as they evaluate the effectiveness of potential HIV cures. For example, clinicians could focus on analyzing blood collected from both peripheral veins and lymph nodes. This knowledge may also help explain why some patients who have received transplants initially have appeared to be cured, but HIV was later detected. Sacha hypothesizes that those patients may have had a small reservoir of HIV in their abdominal lymph nodes that enabled the virus to persist and spread again throughout the body.

Sacha and colleagues continue to study the two nonhuman primates cured of HIV. Next, they plan to dig deeper into their immune responses, including identifying all of the specific immune cells involved and which specific cells or molecules were targeted by the immune system.

This research is supported by the National Institutes of Health (grants AI112433, AI129703, P51 OD011092) and the Foundation for AIDS Research (grant 108832), and the Foundation for AIDS Immune Research. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

In our interest of ensuring the integrity of our research and as part of our commitment to public transparency, OHSU actively regulates, tracks and manages relationships that our researchers may hold with entities outside of OHSU. In regard to this research, Dr. Sacha has a significant financial interest in CytoDyn, a company that may have a commercial interest in the results of this research and technology. Review?details of OHSU’s conflict of interest program?to find out more about how we manage these business relationships.

All research involving animal subjects at OHSU must be reviewed and approved by the university’s?Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC). The IACUC’s priority is to ensure the health and safety of animal research subjects. The IACUC also reviews procedures to ensure the health and safety of the people who work with the animals. No live animal work may be conducted at OHSU without IACUC approval.

REFERENCE: Helen Wu, Kathleen Busman-Sahay, Whitney C. Weber, Courtney M. Waytashek, Carla D. Boyle, Katherine Bateman, Jason S. Reed, Joseph M. Hwang, Christine Shriver-Munsch, Tonya Swanson, Mina Northrup, Kimberly Armantrout, Heidi Price, Mitch Robertson-LeVay, Samantha Uttke, Mithra R. Kumar, Emily J. Fray, Sol Taylor-Brill, Stephen Bondoc, Rebecca Agnor, Stephanie L. Junell, Alfred W. Legasse, Cassandra Moats, Rachele M. Bochart, Joseph Sciurba, Benjamin N. Bimber, Michelle N. Sullivan, Brandy Dozier, Rhonda P. MacAllister, Theodore R. Hobbs, Lauren D. Martin, Angela Panoskaltsis-Mortari, Lois M.A. Colgin, Robert F. Silciano, Janet D. Silciano, Jacob D. Estes, Jeremy V. Smedly, Michael K. Axthelm, Gabrielle Meyers, Richard T. Maziarz, Benjamin J. Burwitz, Jeffrey J. Stanton, Jonah B. Sacha, Allogeneic immunity clears latent virus following allogenic stem cell transplantation in SIV-infected antiretroviral therapy-suppressed macaques, Immunity, May 25, 2023, DOI: 10.1016/j.immuni.2023.04.019.