the universe is in us

Posted by Margaret Harris

https://physicsworld.com/a/theres-an-elephant-in-the-room-at-the-royal-society-and-for-once-its-not-just-elon-musk/

https://physicsworld.com/?p=122051

Just over a week ago, US President Donald Trump released a budget proposal that would, if enacted, eviscerate science research across the country. Among other cuts, it proposes a 57% drop (relative to 2024) in funding for the National Science Foundation (NSF), which provides the lion’s share of government support for basic science. Within this, the NSF’s physics and mathematics directorate stands to lose more than a billion dollars, or 67% of its funding. And despite the past closeness between Trump and SpaceX boss Elon Musk, NASA faces cuts of 24%, including 50% of its science budget.

Of course, the US is not the only nation that funds scientific research, any more than NASA is the only agency that sends spacecraft to explore the cosmos. Still, both are big enough players (and big enough partners for the UK) that I expected these developments to feature at least briefly at last Tuesday’s Royal Society conference on the future of the UK space sector.

During the conference’s opening session, it occasionally seemed like David Parker, a former chief executive of the UK Space Agency (UKSA) who now works for the European Space Agency (ESA), might say a few words on the subject. His opening remarks focused on lessons the UK could learn from the world’s other space agencies, including NASA under the first Trump administration. At one point, he joked that all aircraft have four dimensions: span, length, height and politics. But as for the politics that threaten NASA in Trump’s second administration, Parker was silent.

Let’s talk about something else

This silence continued throughout the morning. All told, 19 speakers filed on and off the stage at the Royal Society’s London headquarters without so much as mentioning what the Nobel-Prize-winning astrophysicist Adam Riess called an “almost extinction level” event for research in their field.

The most surreal omission was in a talk by Sheila Rowan, a University of Glasgow astrophysicist and past president of the Institute of Physics (which publishes Physics World). Rowan was instrumental in the 2015 detection of gravitational waves at the US-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), and her talk focused on gravitational-wave research. Despite this, she did not mention that Trump’s budget would eliminate funding for one of the two LIGO detectors, drastically reducing the research LIGO can do.

When I contacted Rowan to ask why this was, she replied that she had prepared her talk before the budget was announced. The conference, she added, was “a great example of how fantastic science benefits not just the UK, but society more broadly, and globally, and that is a message we must never stop explaining”.

What’s at stake

Rowan ended her talk on a similarly positive note, with hopeful words about the future. “The things that will fly in 2075, we are thinking about now,” she said.

In some cases, that may be true. However, if Trump’s budget passes both houses of the US Congress (the House of Representatives has already passed a bill that would enact most of the administration’s wishes), the harsh reality is that many things space scientists are thinking about will never fly at all.

Over at Astrobites, a site where PhD students write about astronomy and astrophysics for undergraduates, Arizona State University student Skylar Grayson compiled a depressingly long list of threatened missions. Like other graphics that have circled on social media since the budget announcement, Grayson’s places red X’s – indicating missions that are “fully dead” under the new budget – over dozens of projects. Affected missions range from well-known workhorses like Mars Orbiter and New Horizons to planning-stage efforts like the next-generation Earth-observing satellite Landsat Next. According to Landsat Next’s live-at-the-time-of-writing NASA webpage, it is expected to launch no earlier than 2031. What does its future look like now?

And NASA’s own missions are just the start. Several missions led by other agencies – including high-profile ones like ESA’s Rosalind Franklin Mars rover – are under threat. This is because the new NASA budget would eliminate the US’s share of their funding, forcing partners to pick up the tab or see their investments go to waste. Did that possibility not deserve some mention at a conference on the future of the UK space sector?

The elephant in the room

Midway through the conference, satellite industry executive Andrew Stanniland declared that he was about to mention the “elephant in the room”. At last, I thought. Someone’s going to say something. However, Stanniland’s “elephant” was not the proposed gutting of NASA science. Instead, he wanted to discuss the apparently taboo topic of the Starlink network of communications satellites.

Like SpaceX, Tesla and, until recently, Trump’s budget-slashing “department of government efficiency”, Starlink is a Musk project. Musk is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and he remains so after the society’s leadership rejected a grassroots effort to remove him for, inter alia, calling for the overthrow of the UK government. Could it be that speakers were avoiding Musk, Trump and the new US science budget to spare the Royal Society’s blushes?

Exasperated, I submitted a question to the event’s online Q&A portal. “The second Trump administration has just proposed a budget for NASA that would gut its science funding,” I wrote. “How is this likely to affect the future of the space sector?” Alas, the moderator didn’t choose my question – though in fairness, five others also went unanswered, and Rowan, for the record, says that she could “of course” talk about whatever she wanted to.

Finally, in the event’s second-to-last session, the elephant broke through. During a panel discussion on international collaboration, an audience member asked, “Can we really operate [collaboratively] when we have an administration that’s causing irreparable harm to one of our biggest collaborators on the space science stage?”

In response, panellist Gillian Wright, a senior scientist at the UK Astronomy Technology Centre in Edinburgh, called it “an incredibly complicated question given the landscape is still shifting”. Nevertheless, she said, “My fear is that what goes won’t come back easily, so we do need to think hard about how we keep those scientific connections alive for the future, and I don’t know the answer.” The global focus of space science, Wright added, may be shifting away from the US and towards Europe and the global south.

And that was it.

A question of leadership

I logged out of the conference feeling depressed – and puzzled. Why had none of these distinguished speakers (partially excepting Wright) addressed one of the biggest threats to the future of space science? One possible answer, suggested to me on social media by the astrophysicist Elizabeth Tasker, is that individuals might hesitate to say anything that could be taken as an official statement, especially if their organization needs to maintain a relationship with the US. “I think it needs to be an agency-released statement first,” said Tasker, who works at (but was not speaking for) the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). “I totally agree that silence is problematic for the community, and I think that’s where official statements come in – but those may need more time.”

Official statements from agencies and other institutions would doubtless be welcomed by members of the US science workforce whose careers and scientific dreams are at risk from the proposed budget. The initial signs, however, are not encouraging.

On the same day as the Royal Society event, the US’s National Academies of Science (NAS) hosted their annual “State of the Science” event in Washington, DC. According to reporting by John Timmer at Ars Technica, many speakers at this event were, if anything, even keener than the Royal Society speakers to avoid acknowledging the scale of the (real and potential) damage. A few oblique comments from NAS president Marcia McNutt; a few forthright ones from a Republican former congresswoman, Heather Wilson; but overall, a pronounced tendency to ignore the present in favour of a future that may never come.

Frankly, the scientific community on both sides of the Atlantic deserves better.

The post There’s an elephant in the room at the Royal Society – and for once, it’s not (just) Elon Musk appeared first on Physics World.

https://physicsworld.com/a/theres-an-elephant-in-the-room-at-the-royal-society-and-for-once-its-not-just-elon-musk/

https://physicsworld.com/?p=122051

Posted by Isabelle Dumé

https://physicsworld.com/a/quantum-physics-guides-proton-motion-in-biological-systems/

https://physicsworld.com/?p=121938

If you dig deep enough, you’ll find that most biochemical and physiological processes rely on shuttling hydrogen atoms – protons – around living systems. Until recently, this proton transfer process was thought to occur when protons jump from water molecule to water molecule and between chains of amino acids. In 2023, however, researchers suggested that protons might, in fact, transfer at the same time as electrons. Scientists in Israel have now confirmed this is indeed the case, while also showing that proton movement is linked to the electrons’ spin, or magnetic moment. Since the properties of electron spin are defined by quantum mechanics, the new findings imply that essential life processes are intrinsically quantum in nature.

The scientists obtained this result by placing crystals of lysozyme – an enzyme commonly found in living organisms – on a magnetic substrate. Depending on the direction of the substrate’s magnetization, the spin of the electrons ejected from this substrate may be up or down. Once the electrons are ejected from the substrate, they enter the lysozymes. There, they become coupled to phonons, or vibrations of the crystal lattice.

Crucially, this coupling is not random. Instead, the chirality, or “handedness”, of the phonons determines which electron spin they will couple with – a  property known as chiral induced spin selectivity.

Excited chiral phonons mediate electron coupling spin

When the scientists turned their attention to proton transfer through the lysozymes, they discovered that the protons moved much more slowly with one magnetization direction than they did with the opposite. This connection between proton transfer and spin-selective electron transfer did not surprise Yossi Paltiel, who co-led the study with his Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI) colleagues Naama Goren, Nir Keren and Oded Livnah in collaboration with Nurit Ashkenazy of Ben Gurion University and Ron Naaman of the Weizmann Institute.

“Proton transfer in living organisms occurs in a chiral environment and is an essential process,” Paltiel says. “Since protons also have spin, it was logical for us to try to relate proton transfer to electron spin in this work.”

The finding could shed light on proton hopping in biological environments, Paltiel tells Physics World. “It may ultimately help us understand how information and energy are transferred inside living cells, and perhaps even allow us to control this transfer in the future.

“The results also emphasize the role of chirality in biological processes,” he adds, “and show how quantum physics and biochemistry are fundamentally related.”

The HUJI team now plans to study how the coupling between the proton transfer process and the transfer of spin polarized electrons depends on specific biological environments. “We also want to find out to what extent the coupling affects the activity of cells,” Paltiel says.

Their present study is detailed in PNAS.

The post Quantum physics guides proton motion in biological systems appeared first on Physics World.

https://physicsworld.com/a/quantum-physics-guides-proton-motion-in-biological-systems/

https://physicsworld.com/?p=121938

Posted by No Author

https://physicsworld.com/a/development-and-application-of-a-3-electrode-setup-for-the-operando-detection-of-side-reactions-in-li-ion-batteries/

https://physicsworld.com/?p=121965

Join us to learn about the development and application of a 3-Electrode setup for the operando detection of side reactions in Li-Ion batteries.

Detecting parasitic side reactions originating both from the cathode active materials (CAMs) and the electrolyte is paramount for developing more stable cell chemistries for Li-ion batteries. This talk will present a method for the qualitative analysis of oxidative electrolyte oxidation, as well as the quantification of released lattice oxygen and transition metal ions (TM ions) from the CAM. It is based on a 3-electrode cell design employing a Vulcan carbon-based sense electrode (SE) that is held at a controlled voltage against a partially delithiated lithium iron phosphate (LFP) counter electrode (CE). At this SE, reductive currents can be measured while polarizing a CAM or carbon working electrode (WE) against the same LFP CE. In voltametric scans, we show how the SE potential can be selected to specifically detect a given side reaction during CAM charge/discharge, allowing, e.g., to discriminate between lattice oxygen, protons, and dissolved TMs. Furthermore, it is shown via On-line Electrochemical Mass Spectrometry (OEMS) that O2 reduction in the here-used LP47 electrolyte consumes ~2.3 electrons/O2. Using this value, the lattice oxygen release deduced from the 3-electrode setup upon charging of the NCA WE is in good agreement with OEMS measurements up to NCA potentials >4.65 VLi. At higher potentials, the contributions from the reduction of TM ions can be quantified by comparing the integrated SE current with the O2 evolution from OEMS

Lennart Reuter is a PhD student in the group of Prof Hubert A Gasteiger at the Chair of Technical Electrochemistry at TUM. His research focused on the interfacial processes in lithium-ion batteries that govern calendar life, cycle stability, and rate capability. He advanced the on-line electrochemical mass spectrometry (OEMS) technique to investigate gas evolution mechanisms from interfacial side reactions at the cathode and anode. His work also explored how SEI formation and graphite structural changes affect Li⁺ transport, using impedance spectroscopy and complementary analysis techniques.

Leonhard J Reinschluessel is currently a PhD candidate at at the Chair of Technical Electrochemistry in the Gasteiger research group at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). His current work encompasses an in-depth understanding of the complex interplay of cathode- and electrolyte degradation mechanisms in lithium-ion batteries using operando lab-based and synchrotron techniques. He received his MSc in chemistry from TUM, where he investigated the mitigation of aging of FeNC-based cathode catalyst layers in PEMFCs in his thesis at the Gasteiger group Electrochemistry at TUM. His research focused on the interfacial processes in lithium-ion batteries that govern calendar life, cycle stability, and rate capability. He advanced the on-line electrochemical mass spectrometry (OEMS) technique to investigate gas evolution mechanisms from interfacial side reactions at the cathode and anode. His work also explored how SEI formation and graphite structural changes affect Li⁺ transport, using impedance spectroscopy and complementary analysis techniques.

The post Development and application of a 3-electrode setup for the operando detection of side reactions in Li-Ion batteries appeared first on Physics World.

https://physicsworld.com/a/development-and-application-of-a-3-electrode-setup-for-the-operando-detection-of-side-reactions-in-li-ion-batteries/

https://physicsworld.com/?p=121965