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Through molecular engineering, researchers at Northwestern University have found a way to turn organic industrial waste and chemical byproducts into batteries that can be used to supply energy to power grids. The scientists have found a method to contain a waste molecule, triphenylphosphine oxide (TPPO), and use it to form a redox flow battery. Unlike lithium and other solid-state batteries, redox flow batteries don’t store energy in electrodes. Instead, they store energy by having a chemical reaction occur between electrolytes.
Typically, the batteries that power our electronic devices are primarily made from solid metals such as lithium and cobalt. Dependence on these metals has dramatically increased over the last decade-plus, increasing the mining of these metals and encroaching on more and more land. This has led to fear of scarcity along with concerns for the environment as technology increases the demand for battery power.
It's best to reuse batteries when you can.Photo credit: Canva
With this discovery, the hope is that this could lead to not just an organic green alternative power source but one that is even greener due to the fact that it is reusing a previously useless waste product. TPPO is a common waste molecule during a variety of different chemical reactions, including during the mass production of vitamins. Thousands of tonnes of TPPO are produced each year and it needs to be carefully disposed of so it doesn’t impact our water supply. Putting it to use as the primary substance for batteries would make it a win-win.
Reduced phosphine oxides are typically too unstable to be used and applied in such a way. However, through the researchers’ method of molecular engineering, they found a way to address the instability of the substance and tap into its energy storage potential.
After multiple tests and reworking, the scientists created a solvent mix that shows promise. Using static electrochemical charge and discharge studies, they were able to test how effective it was to retain a charge, emit power, and charge up again. The test battery remained healthy and lost very little power capacity after 350 cycles of charging/discharging power.
This new battery can use organic molecules and doesn't need to rely on scarce metals.Photo credit: Canva
“Not only can an organic molecule be used, but it can also achieve high-energy density, getting closer to its metal-based competitors along with high stability,” said Emily Mahoney, a Ph.D. candidate and one of the first authors in the study. “These two parameters are traditionally challenging to optimize together, so being able to show this for a molecule that is waste-derived is particularly exciting.”
The old adage “waste not, want not” seems applicable here. A literal waste product could be the solution to a growing battery problem and a pollution issue at the same time. It goes to show how we all should see the potential uses in whatever we discard.
The goal is still have quality battery power while reducing waste.Photo credit: Canva
It doesn’t even have to turn into a groundbreaking power source, whatever junk you have can still be of use. An old shirt that doesn’t fit anymore can be a great rag for dusting. Banana peels, apple cores, and vegetables that have started to turn in the fridge can be used as compost in the back yard. At worst, the pieces of a broken toy, shattered plate, clock, or other items can be turned into sculptures or other art projects to entertain yourself and your kids for an afternoon. If you look hard enough and experiment enough, you can find some use in the useless.
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Doing social activities could keep your brain healthier in old age.
A new study of the elderly is showing that regular social activity could offset or delay dementia by five years. The study published by the Alzheimer's Association is showing that just playing games with folks regularly, volunteering, or just having a regular lunch with a friend can significantly slow down cognitive decline.
The researchers at Rush University studied 1,923 dementia-free seniors with an average age of 80 that underwent annual neurological evaluations. Cognitive function was measured through 21 different tests that assessed various types of memory along with perception of speed and visuospatial ability. Out of the total, 545 developed dementia and 695 developed some form of mild cognitive impairment within the five-year analysis. Accounting for other factors and adjustments for analysis, such as age, physical fitness, and other health issues, the results found that the participants that participated in social activities regularly had a slower mental decline or little to no decline at all.
Social activity was measured based on a survey that asked participants if they had participated in six common social activities for their age group within the previous year. Some of the options listed included playing bingo, going out on a day or overnight trip, volunteering, visits with friends or relatives, and going out to restaurants. To put it in percentages, the findings showed that a more regular social life pointed at a 38% reduction in dementia risk and a 21% reduction in mild cognitive impairment compared to those who were the least socially active.
Being socially active reduces or slows cognitive decline.Photo credit: Canva
So being active as an older person is not only good for the soul, but good for the brain, too. But that’s when we hit a bit of a problem. As you get older, it becomes more and more difficult to develop new friendships and maintain them. In fact, according to the current U.S. surgeon general, we have a loneliness epidemic in this country that impacts the mental and physical health throughout all age ranges, but particularly people in their 30s and 40s. In other words, younger adults should learn how to be more social now in order for themselves to have the skills to develop friendships as they get older, too. For their brains’ sake, and for overall quality of life.
So how do you make friends as an adult? Well, the answer is that there are many ways you can make new friends and maintain treasured relationships, which is a wonderful problem. The problem is that there are so many options, but finding the right ones for you could take a lot of trial and error.
A weekly card game could help keep your brain healthy.Photo credit: Canva
A simple internet search of “how to make friends as an adult” can lead you to many different options that you might be frozen by choice. To winnow it all down, think of the activities you like or causes you care about. Check online to see if there are any local clubs or a Facebook group/social media group to follow regarding events in your area to meet people. Volunteer your time to a cause or public service you support, like a pet shelter or a food pantry. If you just want to go to an Applebee’s, there might just be a group of folks who also just meet up at Applebee's once a month. If not, maybe you can start one!
If you do have a set of friends or activities, make it a point to show up regularly for them. Have a set appointment to grab lunch with your buddies twice a month. Go to the weekly club meeting, even if you don’t feel like going. Cementing social activities in your routine can help you keep and maintain those connections while providing brain health. If you’re not in the mood, you can even tell yourself “it’s for my brain health” to help motivate you to attend. If not, again, there are other people, clubs, and activities to choose from that might be a better fit for you.
Having a regular dinner date out with friends can do wonders for your mental health.Photo credit: Canva
Do your best to keep that dinner date, pick-up game, or movie night. It’ll not only be fun, but it might also keep your brain strong.
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File:"Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), National Portrait ... 2025
“I go to the flea market because it is full of small, hidden histories,” artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres said in 1995, during an interview for BOMB Magazine with fellow artist Ross Bleckner. Revisiting Gonzalez-Torres’ work now, the statement is poignant. In its own way, his work is also filled with small, hidden histories.
The Cuban-American artist–who was openly gay in the 1980s and 1990s, when it would have been more rare–became known in his lifetime for his conceptual art that lived across mediums of sculpture, installation, photography, painting, and more. Among his most noteworthy series are his “Candy Works,” whose installation in any given space featured an “endless supply” of sweets, from fortune cookies to chocolates to hard candies. Audiences were–and are still now–invited to have a piece and eat it. The work will ebb and flow as it is filled and refilled. It’s in these works that hidden histories–or maybe not so hidden–have most recently been discussed.
Gonzalez-Torres created several candy works in memory of his love Ross Laycock, who passed away from AIDS-related complications in 1991. They too feature never-ending supplies of candies in colored wrappers, to be taken and discarded as in his other work, though this time the echo of loss is so much louder. It can mirror the way AIDS ravaged Laycock’s body, scholars believe, while also living forever in his honor. Gonzalez-Torres and Laycock were together for eight years, the artist said in BOMB. “I never stopped loving Ross. Just because he’s dead doesn’t mean I stopped loving him,” he went on. He defined the years of 1990-1991 as some of the most difficult in his life, and often said his work was made “for an audience of one,” meaning Laycock. Gonzalez-Torres himself passed away from complications due to AIDS in 1996.
One of these works, “Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.),” below, faced controversy recently for the way it was displayed. An exhibition of Gonzalez-Torres’ work, “Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always to Return,” is appearing now at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery and the Archives of American Art. The art scholar Ignacio Darnaude chastised the museum in OUT Magazine for eliminating mentions of AIDS, Laycock, and queerness from the work's wall text:
“The irony is that, by not explaining what Portrait of Ross in L.A. truly means, the National Portrait Gallery has turned his work into an esoteric cypher, depriving visitors from experiencing Felix's revolutionary work in portraiture. Instead of inducing emotion and tears, I witnessed people blissfully taking pictures of pretty candy — empty calories on the floor robbed of their stirring spirit,” Darnaude wrote. Darnaude also cites that curator Jonathan D. Katz spoke of the work in a 2010 National Portrait Gallery show, directly relating Gonzalez-Torres’ work to AIDS, to understanding how it destroyed a person, and how so many participated in culture and policy that let people die.
File:"Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), National Portrait ...commons.wikimedia.org
The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation has since spoken out against the article, instead saying that the curators “have done an extraordinary amount of research and have not only made a point of incorporating significant queer content throughout this exhibition (including direct references to Gonzalez-Torres’s queer identity, his partner Ross Laycock, and both of their deaths from complications from AIDS), but have provided a generous forum for a vast and diverse audience to engage with this content, other political content, and Gonzalez-Torres’s work.” Some refute the foundation’s claims, others agree.
Gonzalez-Torres’s work actively negotiated public space and private life–at the time “Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)” was created, as Darnaude cites Katz, the artist had to find other ways to talk about AIDS in his work because of increased censorship and homophobia in the government. Gonzalez-Torres found a way to bring his voice into systems that otherwise might have sought to oppress it. His work remains perpetually connected to AIDS, to the travesty it wrought on the LGBTQ+ community and the ways the community fought back. It’s a powerful moment to think back on now as the LGBTQ+ community once again faces challenges from the government, particularly in terms of healthcare.
For Gonzalez-Torres, his voice always mattered. “I think that art gives us a voice. Whatever it is, whatever we want to make out of this thing called art,” he said in 1994. “There are different institutions; in the same way that there are a lot of different artistic projects that we can use for our won ends. That's how I see art, as a possibility to have a voice. It's something vital.”
Less than a year before his death, Gonzalez-Torres was still making work and still believed in its capabilities for change. “That’s why I make work, because I still have some hope,” he said in BOMB. “But I’m also very realistic, and I see that . . .It’s about seeing, not just looking. Seeing what’s there."
When sifting through old boxes or stacks of vintage papers, one often uncovers nostalgic relics from the past. But occasionally, these discoveries are far more valuable. Such was the case at the Bavarian Environment Agency (LfU) in Germany. While employees were digitizing their historic mineral collection of 130,000 exhibits, they stumbled upon one of the "rarest minerals on Earth." A handwritten letter in a drawer revealed the name of the mineral—Humboldtine. The LfU shared the details in a January 2024 press release, noting that more information would be published in Geologica Bavarica.
According to Mindat, an online mineral and rock database, humboldtine is “a rare authigenic mineral from the mineral class of organic compounds with the chemical composition Fe2+(C2O4)·2H2O.” It is a water-containing iron salt of oxalic acid, with color ranging in shades of yellow, mostly amber-yellow or lemon-yellow. With crystals small and prismatic, humboldtine forms when carbon compounds and iron-oxide react with water.
Representative Image Source: This Photo is a postcard sent home by a German soldier. (Photo by History & Art Images via Getty Images)
The mineral is typically found in the fracture surfaces in coal deposits and rarely in granitic pegmatites and hydrothermal mineral deposits. It was first discovered by German mineralogist August Breithaupt in a brown coal deposit near the municipality of Korozluky in Okres Most, according to Forbes. In the 1820s, Peruvian geologist Mariano Eduardo de Rivero y Ustariz, named the mineral after the German 19th-century naturalist and explorer Freidrich Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt. Von Humboldt was a former mining engineer and mineral collector.
Representative Image Source: Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859). (Photo by The Print Collector/Getty Images)
The 75-year-old letter that the employees found was written by a coal mine owner and sent in 1949 to the agency. The letter mentions the presence of Humboldtine in the coal seams of the Matthiaszeche near the town of Schwandorf, a town on the river Naab in the Upper Palatinate. The agency asked for some samples to investigate and verify whether the mineral was humboldtine. Led by Roland Eichhorn, head of the geological department at the LfU, X-ray diffractometer, and chemical analysis were carried out of the chunk of mineral found in the archive’s drawer. They described that the mineral was “almost the size of a hazelnut.”
Representative Image Source: Pexels | The Gusstavo
“Skepticism was appropriate. Until now, Humboldtin has only been found as tiny crystals in a few places around the world. It was only through in-house laboratory analysis that we were able to provide certainty,” said Eichhorn in the press release. He further added that "together, these would turn into about a snowball that fits in one hand. And we have now found a second snowball," according to an Instagram post by The Munich Show (@the_munich_show).
The rare find is set up to be exhibited at the LfU stand at the Munich Show (Mineralientage Munchen), which will be held in October 2024. The Munich Show is Europe’s top show for minerals, fossils, gemstones & jewelry.
However, the researchers say that further information about these yellow crystals will probably remain a mystery forever because the mine in Schwandorf, mentioned in the letter, was closed in 1966, and was subsequently flooded.
File:"Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), National Portrait ...
Representative Image Source: This Photo is a postcard sent home by a German soldier. (Photo by History & Art Images via Getty Images)
Representative Image Source: Pexels | Tha Planet Speaks
Representative Image Source: Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859). (Photo by The Print Collector/Getty Images)
Representative Image Source: Pexels | The Gusstavo
