NextGen Vanadium Batteries: Berkeley & Texas A&M Scientists may have solved ‘electron bottleneck’
As the appetite grows for more efficient vehicles and mobile devices based on cleaner, renewable energy sources, so does the demand for batteries that pack more punch, last longer, and charge or discharge more quickly. The compound vanadium pentoxide has grabbed the spotlight as a way to improve lithium-ion batteries. However, it’s less-than-stellar behavior has been problematic.
An international team working at the Molecular Foundry (Berkeley) revealed why the material may not perform as expected. The team discovered how interactions between electrons and ions slow the performance of electrodes made with vanadium pentoxide (Nature Communications, “Mapping polaronic states and lithiation gradients in individual V2O5 nanowires”).
This work answers, in part, why the material gets bogged down. Vanadium pentoxide’s layered atomic structure results in a vast surface area, but a bottleneck occurs. If scientists can address the bottleneck, this material may lead to the next generation of batteries, which pack more punch, last longer, and charge or discharge more quickly.
A scanning electron microscopy image of vanadium pentoxide nanowires. The inset shows a ball-and-stick model of vanadium pentoxide’s atomic structure before and after inserting lithium ions (green). (Image: Texas A&M University)
An international team of scientists working at the Molecular Foundry has revealed how interactions between electrons and ions can slow down the performance of vanadium pentoxide, a material considered key to the next generation of batteries.
The compound vanadium pentoxide has grabbed the spotlight as a potential nanostructured material for state-of-the-art lithium-ion batteries because it can provide a greater surface area for the arrival and insertion of lithium ions. That quality makes vanadium pentoxide a good candidate as a cathode, the part of a battery where electrons and lithium ions enter.
The speed with which electrons can enter and exit the cathode determines how much power the battery can provide. The entry and exit speed also determine how quickly a battery recharges.
Power density and charging are both critical factors in the world of mobile electronics or electrification of our automotive fleet. But despite vanadium pentoxide’s potential, it has yet to be widely adopted commercially because of its less-than-stellar performance when put to the test in the real world.
The new findings shed light on the slowdown. The results show that the flow of electrons in vanadium pentoxide nanowires gets bogged down as it interacts with lithium ions in a phenomenon known as small polaron formation.
The research group, which involved scientists at Texas A&M University, made 2D maps of the electronic properties of synthesized vanadium pentoxide nanowires serving as a model lithium-ion cathode using scanning transmission x-ray microscopy at the Canadian Light Source. They came to the Molecular Foundry to interpret their findings.
Source: Molecular Foundry, Berkeley Lab
Vanadium Redox Flow Batteries for Large Scale Energy Storage
Lithium batteries may reign supreme when it comes to cellphones, laptops and electric vehicles. But for larger-scale energy storage, some are looking at alternative metals and technologies.
Enter Vanadium redox batteries. First successfully created by Dr. Maria Skyllas-Kazacos of the University of New South Wales in the 1980’s, Vanadium redox flow batteries use sulfuric solutions to power themselves. A vanadium electrolyte passing through a proton exchange membrane allows the battery to work, with a solution filling two tanks on either side.
Click Here to Read More: What are Vanadium Redox Batteries?
Leave a comment Posted in Nanotechnology Tagged Batteries, Berkeley, Genesis Nanotechnology, Lithium-ion battery, Nanomaterials, Nanotechnology, Vanadium, Vanadium Redox Battery
‘Light as a Feather’-metal Cathodes for stable lithium-oxygen batteries – Li2-O2
Nanoporous nickel cathodes for lithium oxygen batteries are ultralight, shown here balanced on flower stamens. (© ACS)
Lithium-oxygen systems could someday outperform today’s lithium-ion batteries because of their potential for high energy density. However, a number of important issues, such as their poor electrochemical stability must be addressed before these systems can successfully compete with current rechargeable batteries.Today, in ACS Central Science (“Nanoengineered Ultralight and Robust All-Metal Cathode for High-Capacity, Stable Lithium–Oxygen Batteries”), researchers report a new type of cathode, which could make lithium-oxygen batteries a practical option.
Xin-Bo Zhang and colleagues note that most of the problems associated with lithium-oxygen battery systems arise from two highly reduced oxygen species that react readily with the electrolyte and the cathode. Carbon is a common strong-performing cathode, but it is unstable in these systems.
The successful development of Li–O2 battery technology depends on resolving the issue of cathode corrosion by the discharge product (Li2O2) and/or by the intermediates (LiO2) generated during cell cycling. As an important step toward this goal, we report for the first time the nanoporous Ni with a nanoengineered AuNi alloy surface directly attached to Ni foam as a new all-metal cathode system.
So, the team hypothesized that the key to unlocking lithium-oxygen batteries’ potential could be to create cathodes that are unreactive to the reduced oxygen species, but that still have the same highly conductive, low-weight, porous characteristics of carbon cathodes. The researchers succeeded in creating an ultralight all-metal cathode.
The design incorporated three forms of nickel including a nanoporous nickel interior and a gold-nickel alloy surface directly attached to nickel foam. Compared to carbon cathodes, the system has much higher capacity and is stable for 286 cycles, which is amongst the best for lithium-oxygen systems, and is nearly competitive with current commercial lithium-ion systems.
Further experimentation showed that the stability and performance arise from both the metal used and its nanoporous structure, and that both these aspects could be optimized to further improve performance.
Ji-Jing Xu, Zhi-Wen Chang, Yan-Bin Yin, and Xin-Bo Zhang*
State Key Laboratory of Rare Earth Resources Utilization, Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun 130022, P. R. China
Leave a comment Posted in Nanotechnology Tagged Batteries, Nanotechnology
UC San Diego: Printed, flexible and rechargeable battery can power Wearable Sensors, Solar Cells, Electronics
Stretchable printed batteries
Nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego have developed the first printed battery that is flexible, stretchable and rechargeable. The zinc batteries could be used to power everything from wearable sensors to solar cells and other kinds of electronics.
The work appears in the April 19, 2017 issue of Advanced Energy Materials.
The researchers made the printed batteries flexible and stretchable by incorporating a hyper-elastic polymer material made from isoprene, one of the main ingredients in rubber, and polystyrene, a resin-like component. The substance, known as SIS, allows the batteries to stretch to twice their size, in any direction, without suffering damage.
The ink used to print the batteries is made of zinc silver oxide mixed with SIS. While zinc batteries have been in use for a long time, they are typically non-rechargeable. The researchers added bismuth oxide to the batteries to make them rechargeable.
“This is a significant step toward self-powered stretchable electronics,” said Joseph Wang, one of the paper’s senior authors and a nanoengineering professor at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego, where he directs the school’s Center for Wearable Sensors. “We expect this technology to pave the way to enhance other forms of energy storage and printable, stretchable electronics, not just for zinc-based batteries but also for Lithium-ion batteries, as well as supercapacitors and photovoltaic cells.”
The prototype battery the researchers developed has about 1/5 the capacity of a rechargeable hearing aid battery. But it is 1/10 as thick, cheaper and uses commercially available materials. It takes two of these batteries to power a 3 Volt LED. The researchers are still working to improve the battery’s performance. Next steps include expanding the use of the technology to different applications, such as solar and fuel cells; and using the battery to power different kinds of electronic devices.
Researchers used standard screen printing techniques to make the batteries–a method that dramatically drives down the costs of the technology. Typical materials for one battery cost only $0.50. A comparable commercially available rechargeable battery costs $5.00 Batteries can be printed directly on fabric or on materials that allow wearables to adhere to the skin. They also can be printed as a strip, to power a device that needs more energy. They are stable and can be worn for a long period of time.
Making the batteries rechargeable
The key ingredient that makes the batteries rechargeable is a molecule called bismuth oxide which, when mixed into the batteries’ zinc electrodes, prolongs the life of devices and allows them to recharge. Adding bismuth oxide to zinc batteries is standard practice in industry to improve performance, but until recently, there hasn’t been a thorough scientific explanation for why.
Last year, UC San Diego nanoengineers led by Professor Y. Shirley Meng published a detailed molecular study addressing this question (download PDF here). When zinc batteries discharge, their electrodes react with the liquid electrolyte inside the battery, producing zinc salts that dissolve into a solution. This eventually short circuits the battery. Adding bismuth oxide keeps the electrode from losing zinc to the electrolyte. This ensures that the batteries continue to work and can be recharged.
The work shows that it is possible to use small amounts of additives, such as bismuth oxide, to change the properties of materials. “Understanding the scientific mechanism to do this will allow us to turn non-rechargeable batteries into rechargeable batteries—not just zinc batteries but also for other electro-chemistries, such as Lithium-oxygen,” said Meng, who directs the Sustainable Power and Energy Center at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering
From Innovation to Market
Rajan Kumar, a co-first author on this Advanced Energy Materials paper, is a nanoengineering Ph.D. student at the Jacobs School of Engineering. He and nanoengineering professor Wang are leading a team focused on commercializing aspects of this work. The team is one of five to be selected to join a new technology accelerator at UC San Diego. The technology accelerator is run by the UC San Diego Institute for the Global Entrepreneur, which is a collaboration between the Jacobs School of Engineering and Rady School of Management.
Kumar is excited at the prospect of taking advantage of all that the IGE Technology Accelerator has to offer.
“For us, it’s strategically perfect,” said Kumar, referring to the $50,000 funding for prototype improvements, the focus on prototype testing with a strategic partner, and the entrepreneurship mentoring.
Kumar is confident in the team’s innovations, which includes the ability to replace coin batteries with thin, stretchable batteries. Making the right strategic moves now is critical for commercialization success.
“It’s now about making sure our energies are focused in the right direction,” said Kumar.
In addition to the IGE Technology Accelerator, the team was also recently selected to participate in the NSF Innovation-Corps (I-Corps) program at UC San Diego, also administered by the Institute for the Global Entrepreneur. One of the key tenets of the I-Corps program is helping startup teams validate their target markets and business models early in the commercialization process. Through NSF I-Corps, for example, Kumar has already started interviewing potential customers which has helped the team better focus their commercialization strategy.
Through these programs, Kumar is focused on leading the team through a series of milestones in order to best position their innovations to refine “both what to build and who to build it for,” he said.
Paper Citation
“All-Printed, Stretchable Zn-Ag2O Rechargeable Battery via Hyperelastic Binder for Self-Powering Wearable Electronics” in the journal Advanced Energy Materials.http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aenm.201602096/full
Authors: Rajan Kumar, Jaewook Shin, Lu Yin, Jung-Min You, Prof. Shirley Meng and Prof. Joseph Wang, Department of Nanoengineering, Jacobs School of Engineering, University of California San Diego.
Joseph Wang is a distinguished professor, holds the SAIC endowed chair, and serves as chair of the Department of NanoEngineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering where he directs the Center for Wearable Sensors.
Shirley Meng is a professor in the Department of NanoEngineering and Director of the Sustainable Power and Energy Center at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.
Research funders include: Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (DE-AR0000535); Rajan Kumar acknowledges the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No (DGE-1144086).
This work was performed in part at the San Diego Nanotechnology Infrastructure (SDNI), a member of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure, which is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF).
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MIT: A BIG step toward mass-producible quantum computers
A team of researchers from MIT, Harvard University, and Sandia National Laboratories reports a new technique for creating targeted defects in diamond materials, which is simpler and more precise than its predecessors and could benefit diamond-based quantum computing devices.
Quantum computers are experimental devices that offer large speedups on some computational problems. One promising approach to building them involves harnessing nanometer-scale atomic defects in diamond materials.But practical, diamond-based quantum computing devices will require the ability to position those defects at precise locations in complex diamond structures, where the defects can function as qubits, the basic units of information in quantum computing. In Nature Communications (“Scalable focused ion beam creation of nearly lifetime-limited single quantum emitters in diamond nanostructures”), a team of researchers from MIT, Harvard University, and Sandia National Laboratories reports a new technique for creating targeted defects, which is simpler and more precise than its predecessors.
In experiments, the defects produced by the technique were, on average, within 50 nanometers of their ideal locations.
“The dream scenario in quantum information processing is to make an optical circuit to shuttle photonic qubits and then position a quantum memory wherever you need it,” says Dirk Englund, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science who led the MIT team. “We’re almost there with this. These emitters are almost perfect.”
The new paper has 15 co-authors. Seven are from MIT, including Englund and first author Tim Schröder, who was a postdoc in Englund’s lab when the work was done and is now an assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute. Edward Bielejec led the Sandia team, and physics professor Mikhail Lukin led the Harvard team.
Appealing defects
Quantum computers, which are still largely hypothetical, exploit the phenomenon of quantum “superposition,” or the counterintuitive ability of small particles to inhabit contradictory physical states at the same time. An electron, for instance, can be said to be in more than one location simultaneously, or to have both of two opposed magnetic orientations.
Where a bit in a conventional computer can represent zero or one, a “qubit,” or quantum bit, can represent zero, one, or both at the same time. It’s the ability of strings of qubits to, in some sense, simultaneously explore multiple solutions to a problem that promises computational speedups.
Diamond-defect qubits result from the combination of “vacancies,” which are locations in the diamond’s crystal lattice where there should be a carbon atom but there isn’t one, and “dopants,” which are atoms of materials other than carbon that have found their way into the lattice. Together, the dopant and the vacancy create a dopant-vacancy “center,” which has free electrons associated with it. The electrons’ magnetic orientation, or “spin,” which can be in superposition, constitutes the qubit.
A perennial problem in the design of quantum computers is how to read information out of qubits. Diamond defects present a simple solution, because they are natural light emitters. In fact, the light particles emitted by diamond defects can preserve the superposition of the qubits, so they could move quantum information between quantum computing devices.
Silicon switch
The most-studied diamond defect is the nitrogen-vacancy center, which can maintain superposition longer than any other candidate qubit. But it emits light in a relatively broad spectrum of frequencies, which can lead to inaccuracies in the measurements on which quantum computing relies.
In their new paper, the MIT, Harvard, and Sandia researchers instead use silicon-vacancy centers, which emit light in a very narrow band of frequencies. They don’t naturally maintain superposition as well, but theory suggests that cooling them down to temperatures in the millikelvin range — fractions of a degree above absolute zero — could solve that problem. (Nitrogen-vacancy-center qubits require cooling to a relatively balmy 4 kelvins.)
To be readable, however, the signals from light-emitting qubits have to be amplified, and it has to be possible to direct them and recombine them to perform computations. That’s why the ability to precisely locate defects is important: It’s easier to etch optical circuits into a diamond and then insert the defects in the right places than to create defects at random and then try to construct optical circuits around them.
In the process described in the new paper, the MIT and Harvard researchers first planed a synthetic diamond down until it was only 200 nanometers thick. Then they etched optical cavities into the diamond’s surface. These increase the brightness of the light emitted by the defects (while shortening the emission times).
Then they sent the diamond to the Sandia team, who have customized a commercial device called the Nano-Implanter to eject streams of silicon ions. The Sandia researchers fired 20 to 30 silicon ions into each of the optical cavities in the diamond and sent it back to Cambridge.
Mobile vacancies
At this point, only about 2 percent of the cavities had associated silicon-vacancy centers. But the MIT and Harvard researchers have also developed processes for blasting the diamond with beams of electrons to produce more vacancies, and then heating the diamond to about 1,000 degrees Celsius, which causes the vacancies to move around the crystal lattice so they can bond with silicon atoms.
After the researchers had subjected the diamond to these two processes, the yield had increased tenfold, to 20 percent. In principle, repetitions of the processes should increase the yield of silicon vacancy centers still further.
When the researchers analyzed the locations of the silicon-vacancy centers, they found that they were within about 50 nanometers of their optimal positions at the edge of the cavity. That translated to emitted light that was about 85 to 90 percent as bright as it could be, which is still very good.
Source: By Larry Hardesty, MIT
Leave a comment Posted in Nanotechnology Tagged MIT, Nanomaterials, Nanotechnology, Quantum Computing
Water is surprisingly ordered on the nanoscale
Nanometric-sized water drops are everywhere – in the air as droplets or aerosols, in our bodies as medication, and in the earth, within rocks and oil fields. To understand the behavior of these drops, it is necessary to know how they interact with their hydrophobic environment.
This interaction takes places at the curved droplet interface, a sub-nanometric region that surrounds the small pocket of water. Researchers from EPFL, in collaboration with the institute AMOLF in the Netherlands, were able to observe what was going on in this particular region.
They discovered that molecules on the surface of the drops were much more ordered than expected. Their surprising results have been published in Nature
Communications. They pave the way to a better understanding of atmospheric, biological and geological processes.
Unique perspective on miniscule droplets
At EPFL, Sylvie Roke, director of the Julia Jacobi Chair of Photomedicine -Laboratory for Fundamental BioPhotonics, has developed a unique method for examining the surface of these droplets that are as thick as one thousandth of a hair, with a volume of an attoliter (18 zeros behind the comma).
“The method involves overlapping ultrashort laser pulses in a mixture of water droplets in liquid oil and detecting photons that are scattered only from the interface”, explains Roke. “These photons have the sum frequency of the incoming photons and are thus of a different color. With this newly generated color we can know the structure of the only the interface.”
Hydrogen bonding as strong as in ice
The surface of the water droplets turns out to be much more ordered than that of normal water and is comparable to super cooled (liquid < 0 °C water) water in which the water molecules have very strong hydrogen bond interactions. In ice, these interactions lead to a stable tetrahedral surrounding of each water molecule. Surprisingly, this type of structure was found on the surface of the droplets even at the room temperature – 50 °C above were it would normally appear.
This research provides valuable insight into the properties of nanometric water drops. “The chemical properties of these drops depend on how the water molecules are organized on the surface, so it’s really important to understand what’s going on there,” explained Roke. Further research could target the surface properties of water droplets with adding salt, a more realistic model of marine aerosols that consist of salty water surrounded by a hydrophobic environment. Salt may either enhance the water network or reduce its strength. “Or, it may not do anything at all. Given the surprising results found here, we can only speculate”, says Roke.
The surface of the water droplets turns out to be much more ordered than that of normal water and is comparable to super cooled (liquid < 0 °C water) water in which the water molecules have very strong hydrogen bond interactions. @ EPFL- Julia Jacobi Chair of Photomedicine – Laboratory for fundamental BioPhotonics
The interfacial structure of water droplets in a hydrophobic liquid
Nikolay Smolentsev, Wilbert J. Smit, Huib J. Bakker & Sylvie Roke
Nature Communications 8, Article number: 15548 (2017)
doi:10.1038/ncomms15548
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The Lilium Jet – The world’s first all-electric VTOL jet (vertical take-off and landing): Video
*** From Lilium All-Electric Jet Services
We have incredibly exciting news to share. The Lilium Jet successfully completed its maiden test flight series in the skies above Bavaria. The 2-seater Eagle prototype executed a range of complex maneuvers, including its signature mid-air transition from hover mode to wing-borne forward flight.
Seeing the Lilium Jet take to the sky and performing sophisticated maneuvers with apparent ease is testament to the skill and perseverance of our amazing team. We have solved some of the toughest engineering challenges in aviation to get to this point. The successful test flight programme shows that our ground-breaking technical design works exactly as we envisioned. We can now turn our focus to designing a 5-seater production aircraft.
Lilium enables you to travel 5 times faster than a car by introducing the world’s first all-electric vertical take-off and landing jet: an air taxi for up to 5 people. You won’t have to own one, you will simply pay per ride and call it with a push of a button. It’s our mission to make air taxis available to everyone and as affordable as riding a car.
In 1894, Otto Lilienthal began experimenting with the first gliders and imagined a future in which we could all fly wherever we want, whenever we want. Lilium is turning that dream into reality. We are bringing personalized, clean and affordable air travel to everyone.
Read about the Lilium Jet Story and Technology
The world’s first electric vertical take-off and landing jet.
** Information obtained for this article is from the Company’s News Release and Website It is for informational purposes only and does not represent any form of endorsement. **
Leave a comment Posted in Nanotechnology Tagged Batteries, Electric Jet Flight, Lilium, VTOL
New Battery Could Power Electric Cars 620 Miles (@ 1,000km) on Single Charge
The average American drives about 30 miles (48 kilometers) per day, according to AAA, yet many people are still reluctant to buy electric cars that can travel three times that distance on a single charge.
This so-called range anxiety is one reason gasoline-powered vehicles still rule the road, but a team of scientists is working to ease those fears.
Mareike Wolter, Project Manager of Mobile Energy Storage Systems at Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft in Dresden, Germany, is working with a team on a new battery that would give electric cars a range of about 620 miles (1,000 km) on a single charge.
Wolter said the project began about three years ago when researchers from Fraunhofer as well as ThyssenKrupp System Engineering and IAV Automotive Engineering started brainstorming about how they could improve the energy density of automotive lithium batteries.
They turned to the popular all-electric car, the Tesla, as a starting point. Tesla’s latest vehicle, the Model S 100D has a 100-kilowatt-hour battery pack, which reportedly gives it a range of 335 miles (540 km).
The pack is large, about 16 feet long, 6 feet wide and 4 inches thick. It contains more than 8,000 lithium-ion battery cells, each one individually packaged inside a cylinder housing that measures about 2 to 3 inches (6 to 7 centimeters) high and about 0.8 inches (2 cm) across.
“We thought if we could use the same space as the battery in the Tesla, but improve the energy density and finally drive 1,000 km, this would be nice,” Wolter told Live Science.
One way of doing this would be to refine the materials inside the battery so that it could store more energy, she said. But another way would be to improve the system’s design as a whole, Wolter said.
Nearly 50 percent of each cell is devoted to components such as the housing, the anode (the battery’s negative terminal), the cathode (the battery’s positive terminal) and the electrolyte, the liquid that transports the charged particles.
Additional space is needed inside the car to wire the battery packs to the vehicle’s electrical system.
“It’s a lot of wasted space,” Wolter said. “You have a lot of inactive components in the system, and that’s a problem from our point of view.”
The scientists decided to reimagine the entire design, they said.
An illustration that shows how the new electric battery is stacked like a ream of paper. Credit: Fraunhofer IKTS
To do so, they got rid of the housings that encase individual batteries and turned to a thin, sheet-like design instead of a cylinder.
Their metallic sheet is coated with an energy-storage material made from powdered ceramic mixed with a polymer binder. One side serves as the cathode, and other side serves as the anode.
The researchers stacked several of these so-called bipolar electrodes one on top of the other, like sheets of paper in a ream, separating the electrodes by thin layers of electrolyte and a material that prevents electrical charges from shorting out the whole system.
The “ream” is sealed within a package measuring about 10 square feet (1square meter), and contacts on the top and bottom connect to the car’s electrical system.
The goal is to build a battery system that fits in the same space as the one used by Tesla’s vehicles or other electric vehicles, the researchers said.
“We can put more electrodes storing the energy in the same space,” Wolter said.
She added that the researchers aim to have such a system ready to test in cars by 2020.
Original article on Live Science.
Leave a comment Posted in Nanotechnology Tagged Batteries, Energy, EV's, Genesis Nanotechnology, Live Science, Nanotechnology
MIT: Tesla Not the Only Battery Game in Town ~ Electric Cars Could Be Cheaper Than Internal Combustion by 2030
German chancellor Angela Merkel visits Accumotive’s plant in Kamenz, Germany.
Tesla gets the headlines, but big battery factories are being built all over the world, driving down prices.
Battery production is booming, and Tesla is far from the only game in town.
According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, global battery production is forecast to more than double between now and 2021. The expansion is in turn driving prices down, good news both for the budding electric-car industry and for energy companies looking to build out grid-scale storage to back up renewable forms of energy.
While Tesla gets tons of attention for its “gigafactories”—one in Nevada that will produce batteries, and another in New York that will produce solar panels—the fact is, the company has a lot of battery-building competition.
Exhibit A is a new battery plant in Kamenz, Germany, run by Accumotive. The half-billion-euro facility broke ground on Monday with a visit from German chancellor Angela Merkel and will supply batteries to its parent company, Daimler, which is betting heavily on the burgeoning electric-vehicle market.
But the lion’s share of growth is expected to be in Asia. BYD, Samsung, LG, and Panasonic (which has partnered with Tesla) are all among the world’s top battery producers, and nine of the world’s largest new battery factories are under construction in China (paywall), according to Benchmark Minerals.
That competition means the steady downward trend in battery prices is going to continue. On a per-kilowatt-hour basis, costs have fallen from $542 in 2012 to around $139 today, according to analysis by Benchmark.
That makes for a huge difference in the cost of an electric car, of which 40 percent is usually down to the battery itself.
Bloomberg’s analysts have already said that the 2020s could be the decade in which electric cars take off—and one even went so far as to say that by 2030, electric cars could be cheaper than those powered by internal combustion.
Those watching the industry might worry that a flood of cheap batteries could end up hurting profitability for producers, as happened in the solar-panel business.
That could happen, but India and China, two huge rising automotive markets, are bullish about using electric cars to help solve problems like traffic congestion and air pollution. So even as supply ramps up, there is likely to be plenty of demand to go around.
MIT Technology Review: M. Reilly Sr. Editor
Leave a comment Posted in Nanotechnology Tagged Batteries, Electric Vehicles, Energy, EV's, Genesis Nanotechnology, Nanotechnology, Tesla
BrightVolt flexible batteries using solid state lithium polymer: YouTube Video
BrightVolt (http://brightvolt.com)
develops flexible batteries using solid state thin film lithium polymer, Polymer Matrix Electrolyte (PME) for batteries enabling new small IoT devices, smart clothing, healthcare and more.
Leave a comment Posted in Nanotechnology Tagged Batteries, Flexible electronics, Flexible Screens, Nano Batteries
A Holey Graphene Electrode framework that enables highly efficient charge delivery – Making Better Batteries for the Future
This visualisation shows layers of graphene used for membranes. Credit: University of Manchester
A team of researchers affiliated with institutions in the U.S., China and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has developed a new type of porous graphene electrode framework that is capable of highly efficient charge delivery. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes how they overcame traditional conflicts arising between trade-offs involving density and speed to produce an electrode capable of facilitating rapid ion transport. Hui-Ming Cheng and Feng Li with the Chinese Academy of Sciences offer a Perspective piece on the work done by the team in the same journal issue, and include some opinions of their own regarding where such work is likely heading.
In a perfect world, batteries would have unlimited energy storage delivered at speeds high enough to power devices with unlimited needs. The phaser from Star Trek, for example, would require far more power and speed than is possible in today’s devices.
While it is unlikely that such technology will ever come about, it does appear possible that batteries of the future will perform much better than today, likely due to nano-structured materials—they have already shown promise when used as electrode material due to their unique properties. Unfortunately, their use has been limited thus far due to the ultra-thin nature of the resulting electrodes and their extremely low mass loadings compared to those currently in use. In this new effort, the researchers report on a new way to create an electrode using graphene that overcomes such limitations.
The electrode they built is porous, which in this case means that it has holes in it. Those holes, as Cheng and Li note, allow better charge transport while also offering improved capacity retention density. The graphene framework they built, they note, offers a superior means of electron transport and its porous nature allows for a high ion diffusion rate—the holes force the ions to take shortcuts, reducing diffusion.
Cheng and Li suggest the new work is likely to inspire similar designs in the search for better electrode materials, which they further suggest appears likely to lead to new electrodes that are not only practical, but have high mass loadings.
Explore further: New graphene framework bridges gap between traditional capacitors, batteries
More information: Hongtao Sun et al. Three-dimensional holey-graphene/niobia composite architectures for ultrahigh-rate energy storage, Science (2017). DOI: 10.1126/science.aam5852
Nanostructured materials have shown extraordinary promise for electrochemical energy storage but are usually limited to electrodes with rather low mass loading (~1 milligram per square centimeter) because of the increasing ion diffusion limitations in thicker electrodes.
We report the design of a three-dimensional (3D) holey-graphene/niobia (Nb2O5) composite for ultrahigh-rate energy storage at practical levels of mass loading (>10 milligrams per square centimeter). The highly interconnected graphene network in the 3D architecture provides excellent electron transport properties, and its hierarchical porous structure facilitates rapid ion transport.
By systematically tailoring the porosity in the holey graphene backbone, charge transport in the composite architecture is optimized to deliver high areal capacity and high-rate capability at high mass loading, which represents a critical step forward toward practical applications.
Journal reference: Science
Leave a comment Posted in Nanotechnology Tagged Batteries, Energy storage, Genesis Nanotechnology, Graphene, Nano Batteries, University of Manchester


David Crosby Saddens His Fans As He Shuts Down The Rumors About Neil Young And Possible Reunion
Melek Nur Pervan
The founding member of The Byrds and Crosby, Stills & Nash, David Crosby shared a post on his official page responding to a fan’s expectations of him performing for the 2021 Grammys along with Neil Young, however, Crosby made it perfectly clear that it’s not going to happen.
As you may know, The Recording Academy revealed nominations for the 2021 Grammys on November 24 on their official website. The nominations and expectations of winners thrilled the fans since the Grammys is one of the biggest celebrations of music, however, they are also concerned with the performances on the show.
For next year’s Grammy Awards, the official website of Billboard started a poll mostly including pop star names like Beyonce, Billie Eilish, Taylor Swift and asked fans who should perform for the upcoming award show.
In addition to the musicians who were already on the list, Billboard also added another choice in which all fans got the opportunity to add a musician of their choice. Since the official Twitter page of Billboard also announced the survey, fans have already started to share their opinions.
Alongside fans, David Crosby also shared a post on his official Twitter page and revealed his choice for the performer on the 2021 Grammys. Apparently, Crosby wants to see one of the best selling artists of all time, James Taylor, three-time Grammy winner band, Snarky Puppy, and former member of Drive-By Truckers and four-time Grammy winner, Jason Isbell.
Here is what Crosby said:
“James Taylor, Snarky Puppy, Jason Isbell”
After given the opportunity, a fan shared a post on Twitter stating that David Crosby, Neil Young, Grahan Nash, and Stephen Stills, the former members of the band Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young should be performing for the upcoming Grammy Awards.
Here is what the fan said:
“David Crosby, Neil Young, Graham Nash, Stephen Stills”
David Crosby replied to that fan’s tweet and shared a post on his official Twitter page strictly revealing that it’s not going to happen which led fans to think a reunion like this does not seem quite possible.
“I guarantee that will not happen.“
You can see the Twitter posts below.
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A group of priests performing agni puja, in which a dedication is made to Lord Shiva
The mass pilgrimage at Kumbh Mela unites Hindus in a splendid showcase of faith and devotion
Text Shirin Bhandari
Photos Gunther Deichmann
The Hindu devotee’s hands are pressed together. His palms touch, close to his chest, and his fingers point upwards. His brightly-coloured turban is in stark contrast to his thick white beard. “Namaste,” he says with a slight bow. Literally translated, the word means “I bow to the divine in you.” A respectful greeting, namaste, or namaskar, combined with the wordless hand gesture, conveys the same meaning of acknowledgement for a loved one, a guest or a stranger, regardless of the speaker’s language, culture or religion. Amidst the potpourri of more than 1,500 languages spoken in India, namaste is a universal form of salutation, understood by all, and particularly so during the Kumbh Mela. The left-to-right head wobble – would that be a yes or a no? – is another story!
Sadhus come from all over India to participate in the Kumbh Mela, held every 12 years in Ujjain (Image © Gunther Deichmann)
It is a Sensory Overload
India is not for the faint-hearted. It is sensory overload; there are no grey areas: either you’ll love to travel the country or hate it well enough to take the first flight out. India can break you with its poverty, lack of privacy and dirt; ironically, Western travellers claim to have found inner spirituality after a two-week trip. The Kumbh Mela – the largest spiritual gathering in the world, when Hindus gather en masse to bathe in a sacred river and cleanse themselves of sin – is the ultimate test.
First documented by a Chinese traveller in the seventh century, the colourful celebration of the world’s oldest religion is held once every 12 years. The exact date of the festival is determined according to a combination of the zodiac positions of Jupiter, the sun and the moon.
Hindu mythology describes how the Lord Vishnu dropped the drink of immortality over four locations as he was transporting it in a kumbha (pot), hence the name. The Mela (gathering) is centred at the banks of a river where devotees bathe to cleanse themselves of their sins. The main festival site is, of course, located on the banks of a river: the Ganges at Haridwar; the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna and the invisible Sarasvati at Allahabad; the Sarasvati at Allahabad; the Godavari at Nashik; and the Shipra at Ujjain.
A group of priests performing agni puja, in which a dedication is made to Lord Shiva (Image © Gunther Deichmann)
The Kumbh Mela is a melting pot of the millions of people that visit from the various states who, despite speaking diversely different languages, converge peacefully in the name of religion. The event is widely known by its Sanskrit name, Kumbha, the sacred language of Hinduism and a ceremonial language in pujas (prayers) and religious rituals. Sanskrit is the sacred language of Hinduism and one of the oldest Indo-European languages in the world. The literature holds a deep tradition in drama, poetry, religious and philosophical texts.
As such, Sanskrit hymns and chants are widely heard throughout the Kumbh Mela. Kumbha is also – fittingly – the sign of the Aquarius.
The Kumbh Mela in Ujjain can be traced back to the 18th century. The ancient city, considered one of the most sacred places in India, sits along the eastern bank of the Kshipra River and is located in the state of Madhya Pradesh in central India. It is as if time has stood still here. Visitors travel to India on planes, trains and automobiles, then transfer to more eclectic, old-world modes of transportation: camels, horses, even elephants. The devotees are from all walks of life, from various castes and religious orders – Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, even Christian missionaries – with one purpose: to bathe and be born again, freed into an eternal life without sin and suffering. Between 22 April and 21 May 2016, approximately 75 million people visited.
The main temple of reverence in Ujjain is the Mahakaleshwar Jyotirlinga, situated on the side of the Rudra Sagar Lake. It is one of the most famous Hindu temples dedicated to Lord Shiva, and is said to be one of twelve jyotirlingams that is the most sacred abode of Lord Shiva. The Ram Ghat – one of the most popular – is located close to the Harsiddhi Temple in Ujjain. Indian astronomers have calculated that the Tropic of Cancer passes through the city of Ujjain, making it the Greenwich of India.
The Peoples
The largest crowd-pullers at the Kumbh Mela are the sadhus or the holy men of India. The root word sadh in Sanskrit means ‘to reach one’s goal’; the same word is used in the sadhana, or spiritual practice. Becoming a sadhu is the fourth stage in a Hindu’s life, and the practice is also open to women (sadvi). Coming from a variety of castes, the holy people of India practise a nomadic life and their spiritual discipline involves self-denial: renouncing the world for meditation and contemplation.
Living apart from society – in Hindu temples, ashrams, forests and caves – the sadhus focus on their yogic and spiritual beliefs. Some of them thrive in large communes while others choose a more reclusive lifestyle. They rely on donations from people to survive. It is a difficult path and sadhus are considered legally dead unto themselves and to India. Regardless, it is believed that their devotion is good karma and beneficial to Indian society.
The nanga (naked) sadhus, with their thick dreadlocks and ash-covered skin, claim to be in the company of ghosts. They certainly look the part. India has an infinite amount of rituals and traditions that can lead one to God. Their choice to live in cemeteries as part of their holy path is, however, macabre. Some are thought to possess special powers. The fascination with the Lord Shiva explains their heavy use of charas (cannabis), who was thought to have a deep affinity for the plant.
Most devotees at the event are draped in brightly-coloured fabrics, though marigold is predominant, and beads of different shapes and sizes, often mixed with silver, adorn their necks and wrists. Tents of various hues fill the horizon. Fragrant food stalls serve only vegetarian cuisine so that nobody is offended. The smell of musky incense mixed with ganja (marijuana) fills the air. The stairs leading down to the body of water are full of people patiently waiting their turn in the river. The nanga sadhus flock to bathe, proving that one can detach from worldly things. The outcome is an overwhelming, unexpected and extraordinary visual feast.
Every 144 years, a Maha (great) Kumbh Mela occurs. It is said that in 2013, more than 120 million pilgrims attended the Maha Kumbh Mela in Allahabad within a span of two months. The gathering was so huge that it was visible from space!
Whatever the reasons for the pilgrimage, the Kumbh Mela has proven for centuries that it embodies the Indian spirit. From this whirlwind of activities and swirl of languages and cultures, faith – together with the timeless journey towards forgiveness and redemption – is the one factor that unites people.
For more stories and photographs from this issue, check out Asian Geographic Issue 120.
Gunther Deichmann
Shirin Bhandari
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The effect of competition by Chinese exports in international markets on the Portuguese labour market
Chinese exports may affect a given country directly through intensifying competition in the domestic market, but also indirectly in foreign markets where firms from that country compete with Chinese exports. In fact, the large export market share gains of China in low-tech, low-skill products, like textiles, clothing, footwear, and electric appliances, were accompanied by losses in the export shares of several other countries, like Portugal. These indirect effects of competition in third-country export markets are the main object of this study; they can be significant given the growing sophistication of China’s exports, implying greater competition in virtually all industries in which developed economies operate. In our work, we analyze both the direct and indirect labour market effects of rising international trade exposure to China, focusing on the case of Portugal.
Consistent with previous research, we find evidence that China’s expanding role in global trade represented a major negative shock for the Portuguese labour market. However, in contrast to evidence from other countries, the direct effects of increased imports from China are mostly non-significant. The negative labour market effects stem exclusively from the higher competition of Chinese products in the main destination markets of Portuguese exports. Portuguese workers in industries more exposed to this indirect competition from China saw their total cumulative wages and employment fall when compared to similar workers in less exposed industries. Particular groups of workers were more affected by the Chinese competition in international markets, namely women, older and less educated workers. The paper points to the relevance of differentiating the effects of trade on the cross section of workers when designing economic and social policies aimed at supporting workers hurt by globalization.
Click here to go to the paper by Sónia Cabral, Pedro S. Martins, João Pereira dos Santos and Mariana Tavares.


Are “The Classics” Bad for You?
February 8, 2022 • By Naomi Kanakia
IN MY FIELD, young adult fiction, there’ll be a viral Twitter thread every few months that asks, “What books should no longer be taught in high school?” And hundreds of people will inevitably name stuffy old white books that they think have no relevance to modern teens and/or which they hated reading as kids.
Now we’re not talking Homer or Plato here. Usually, people will mention The Great Gatsby or The Catcher in the Rye. Sometimes Ethan Frome comes up (deservedly so, it’s one of Wharton’s weakest works). Weirdly, people always bring up Moby-Dick, to which my response is, “What high schools are teaching Moby-Dick? Even most colleges don’t teach it anymore.”
Inevitably these exchanges become heated, as people leap in to defend “classic literature” and the general concept of “reading the Classics.” Sometimes passions really flare, and I have a number of writer-acquaintances who will, in private, shake their heads at these threads and talk about cancel culture and censorship and how you’re not allowed to think improper thoughts anymore.
The whole phenomenon is of particular interest to me for two reasons. The first is that I adore the Classics, and my extensive reading is a major part of my personal identity, so I always have to restrain myself from weighing in.
And the second is that I never did the reading in high school. The last book I remember opening for high school English was Pride and Prejudice in 10th grade, and it was so dull that I threw it across the room and finished my essay using CliffsNotes. For most of college, and even grad school, I didn’t read any of the required texts.
I have since gone back and read most of these books and loved them! I remember laughing out loud at the first page of Pride and Prejudice, which I finally read when I was 26, and wondering how my 10th-grade self could have possibly disliked it.
And yet I still hate doing the required reading. It’s antithetical to the whole spirit of reading, in my view. It’s one reason I no longer accept books for review — the process of having to read a book is simply too grueling. The freedom to read what I want when I want is a critical part of my intellectual life, and I frankly resent whenever someone tries to rob me of that freedom — even when they’re a professor I’m paying to teach me! I know, it’s messed up. The point is: I sympathize with the people who just don’t want to be forced to read books they think are bad.
On the other hand, I know a lot of people, many of them teachers or professors, who are very invested in the idea of forcing other people to read this book or that book. And I understand that, too. They see it not just as beneficial to their students but as a duty that is required of them by their profession. Others may feel a more generalized sense of responsibility to the young people of the world: I remember being shocked when another (quite good) YA writer told me that she never wrote anything that didn’t have some didactic purpose. She saw it as her responsibility to educate and inform young people.
That’s not really how I feel at all. I don’t think the work I do as a writer or a thinker has any broader purpose other than to explore ideas and raise questions. And I’m lucky to be in a field and a life situation where, honestly, nobody cares what I’ve read, and I don’t need to make choices about what other people should read.
But I think that, because I participate in the life of the mind without feeling any concomitant responsibilities toward young people, I can perhaps better see that kicking books out of high school curricula isn’t entirely an abridgment of free speech. To argue that nobody should be allowed to read a book is censorship, and it would be stifling to one’s art. To simply not be taught a book isn’t quite the same thing. I think there is a certain confusion here between the freedom we as writers and thinkers need to feel in our reading — we cannot feel like there’s anything we’re simply not allowed to read — and the wholly separate topic of what books children should be compelled to read.
To my mind, the two are very separate things. A person’s art needs to be free and unrestrained, whereas the development of curricula is a civic problem — it’s a community issue that cannot be resolved without constraint, without loss, and without change.
Now, a person can definitely have opinions about curricula. But they need to accept that their opinions won’t necessarily be privileged. For instance, I often hear other writers, especially in my field, say they don’t have time for that old stuff, especially for books by old white men. Personally, I would never in my life advise a young writer to avoid older books. But it’s not up to me. Every person has to decide for themselves what to read. And, personally, I am very interested in the question of whether a writer who is relentlessly locked into contemporary mindsets can still write thoughtful and nuanced fiction. I doubt it, but they’re the person who will suffer, not me.
In fact, sometimes, the competitive part of me is a little gleeful that so many people ignore our literary history. I think, “Wow, given the amount of talent and brilliance in the world, it would be very difficult for me to produce anything worthwhile if it weren’t for the fact that so many writers are giving themselves a massive disadvantage before they’ve begun.”
Some people try to strike a middle ground here and say, “Well, you don’t have to read white people, but you really ought to read books from before the contemporary era.” Except who are we really talking about? What nonwhite writers specifically? The Indian and Chinese and Latin American writers from before 1900 are usually just as wrapped up in prejudice and exploitation as the white writers.
I think reading white people is important, too. I would be surprised if someone writing in English could write at their best without reading any white writers. Our language and its literary history are largely a product, until relatively late in the game, of white people. A great many of those white people had terrible and reprobate political views. I wish that wasn’t the case. I wish that there were Indian writers who were writing in English in the 19th century who could’ve played the role in the development of the English language that Dickens did, but there weren’t. Instead, we have Indian writers who came fresh to the language as a result of colonialism, and in order to fully possess and work with the language, they had to read writers like Dickens. That’s not true to the same extent today — you can write fairly well in English without reading white writers — but there are still vast parts of the English literary tradition that are inaccessible if you don’t read white writers.
Others, of course, see the situation quite differently. In their opinion, Dickens is poisoned by his faults (the horrendous antisemitism of Oliver Twist comes to mind), and they can’t bear to read him, much less make him a literary model. And that’s fine. They’ll be judged, as I am, not by their reading but by their work. And many of those people are much more critically and commercially successful than I am! So, I am sure they’re laughing at me right now.
In these times, it doesn’t really serve a writer or a thinker to become too possessive of their culture or their reading. We have to put our work first and engage in actions that support our work.
I’ve been reading a lot of Kant lately, and I found it amusing that in his essay “What Is Enlightenment?” he says a society can only achieve Enlightenment if it allows “freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters.” After saying this, however, he immediately backtracks, twisting himself in knots trying to explain that, by “public use,” he only means “that use which a man, as scholar, makes of it before the reading public.” He contrasts this with the private use of reason, which is the use “a man makes of his reason in a civic post that has been entrusted to him.” (Yes, I know, he’s using public and private in exactly the opposite way we would use them today.) Sometimes, he argues, the same job involves both the public and the private use of a person’s reason. The private use is constrained, while the public use must be free. An example is a minister who is bound to preach the doctrines of his church to his congregation even though, as a scholar, he openly disagrees with those same doctrines.
Kant took care to make this distinction because he lived in 18th-century Prussia — a militarized, autocratic society where people clearly were not free to do as they wished. The Prussian state is nobody’s idea of a society conducive to freedom. But it allowed Kant to think freely and to communicate with other thoughtful people.
I think, similarly, we are entering a time when many academics and teachers will have to confront the difference between their public and private characters. And, for a lot of people who are used to their narrative being the dominant one, this will be an unfamiliar experience. Unlike me, they work in fields that have given them status and prestige because of their reading and their expertise in what they regard as the Classics. And they’ve been free to impose their viewpoints on other people, particularly their students.
But now they will experience what, frankly, many marginalized people have always experienced: a sense of disjunction, a sense of working within an institution whose values are at odds with their own. And they will experience the need to subject their views to the marketplace of ideas and to risk being shouted down or vilified.
I am glad I am not in charge of creating a curriculum for young writers. I have loved many writers who wrote things that a modern young person would find intolerable. I’m thinking of the ableism of Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity (1939), for instance; the bizarre phobia about lesbians in Proust; or the participation of the ancient Greeks and Romans in a vicious slave economy. As a trans woman, I have many times encountered transphobic jokes and remarks in works I’ve read and enjoyed, including some from as recently as the last 15 years (off the top of my head, I can name episodes of Bob’s Burgers, How I Met Your Mother, and 30 Rock). If I only read writers who thought that trans people were full human beings worthy of respect, I would have a very limited set of texts to read.
Nonetheless, that set would still be larger than any human being could ever read in a lifetime. And if a writer wanted to limit themselves to that group, then I would understand the principle behind it. But if they asked me, in my professional opinion, whether that would be conducive to them writing beautiful and nuanced literature — the sort of thing that can stand with the best that’s ever been thought or written — I would have to say, “You’re really hindering yourself. And given the difficulty of your goal, you should be aiming to shed hindrances, not take them on.”
Luckily, nobody asks me that! I’m not a professor. I’m not a teacher. I don’t design curricula. But let’s say that I were, and let’s say my student responded, quite earnestly, by saying, “I’ve heard what you have to say, and I must report that these books are harmful to me, and I believe with the core of my being that I shouldn’t be asked to read them.”
Well … you can ignore one such student. Or two. Maybe even 10. But eventually the voice becomes too loud, and the only practical thing is to say, “I think you’re wrong, but have it your way. Let’s find some overlap between what I can teach and what you’re willing to learn.”
Naomi Kanakia is the author of three novels, out and forthcoming from Little, Brown and Harper, and of a guide to the publishing industry.
Naomi Kanakia
Naomi Kanakia is the author of three novels, out and forthcoming from Little, Brown and Harper, and of a guide to the publishing industry. Her stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Clarkesworld, Gulf Coast, F&SF, The Indiana Review, West Branch, Vallum, and others. She lives in San Francisco with her wife and daughter.
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Here is a summary of current entertainment news.
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Tuna Salad Theater
A few years ago the New York Times had a test you could take and the point was they'd be able to tell you within some impressively small mile-radius just where you were from. The battle lines were really drawn on words like water fountain, which some people ridiculously call bubblers, traffic circles known to some as roundabouts, which, if anyone has spent as much time as I have trying to navigate DC traffic circles, they'd know they couldn't possibly be called something as charming as "roundabout." Lollipops are apparently also called suckers by some strange geographic groups. And of course there's the great soda debate. When I arrived at college I had a midwestern roommate and a southern one, and it was then that I learned that the central Ohioan called all brands of bubbly beverages, sweetened or not, caffeinated or citrusy, "pop," which actually made a kind of sense to me even though it was wrong. But my North Carolinian roommate claimed it all as Coke. Even Pepsi is Coke! The expectation when ordering at a restaurant was to request a "Coke" and then be asked what kind--Sprite, diet, root beer, and so on.
Absolutely ridiculous.
And now, all these years later, I find myself baffled by a different kind of puzzle having to do with the word theater, which my husband inexplicably pronounces "THEE-der" and my son, doubly inexplicably, pronounces "the-AY-der." My husband was born in St. Louis and grew up in Providence and his parents pronounce the word theater as I do, which is to say, correctly. And my son was born in Brooklyn and is growing up in Washington DC. So you can see why it's all very confusing to me since he says basically every single other word as I do. This is not, as some mispronunciations are, an issue of a speech impediment or childlike pronunciation, with which I am familiar.
My seven-year-old does a wonderful thing with her R's. At first she couldn't say them at all really, and they came out as W's, which I know is common. Her R's then transitioned briefly to a kind of Hebrew "resh" sound, and now there's something else happening, a kind of folding in of the sound, which is the only way I can really put it, and I absolutely love it because it's like her own sound, her own language, which is not the same thing as an inexplicable mispronunciation. And I know that some day she will be taught to fix this, and that some parents might already have gotten it taken care of, but we haven't yet seen a need. It's not that we are encouraging childish mispronunciations--except when we are, as is the case in our home with blueberries (bupahdees) and cucumbers (cucaboos and cumayas, both), because there is something so utterly charming to parents about the ways in which our children hear words, bring them into their heads and then back out of their mouths with different sounds, and in this case I simply cannot let go of the two-year-old pronunciations. But we're also not telling our children they're wrong, even in the case of the mysterious theater, because, it seems to me, as a parent I spend so very much of my time correcting, either gently, or not-so-gently.
And maybe it would be nicer to think of all of this correcting as guiding. Is it not, after all, our job as parents to guide these little beings we created? To mold them in the image we believe is best, the one that will lead them to live lives of goodness and meaning and service, to help them to be good citizens, mensches in their communities, and maybe even to pronounce words correctly, or at least within the New York Times realm of their regional dialects?
This was easier when all we were trying to teach our children was to not eat bandaids found in the playground sandbox, or not to bite other kids when they're taking too long with the play-doh. But now that my children are older--old enough, even, to notice the very many ways and styles in which other families - other parents - are doing it, are raising their children, guiding them, correcting them--this has become infinitely harder because not only are we still eking out this path for them, sometimes (okay, most of the time) as we go along and as they age, we are now also eking it out while being asked WHY we are doing it the way we are, as opposed to, say, the ways other families are, and we are being asked this by our five-, seven-, and nine- year olds whose intellectual sophistication seems to fluctuate by the minute. So my husband and I are trying to teach our children that, for now, they have no choice but to do the things the way our family does them because we think our ways are best, while at the same time attempting diplomacy on the part of their friends' families' ways, which has led me to be the kind of desperately unlikable person who says things like "well, in our family we only have one dessert after lunch and that's just the way it is."
So yes, for those of us who aren't struggling to meet our childrens' most basic physical needs, who are downright lucky enough to be able to spend time thinking about all of this stuff, there are different ways to do it, to love children and give them the platform they need to become all the things we hope for them. Heck, there are different ways to do this within a family according to each child's needs and personality! And we're all just stumbling along, hoping what we want for them is right, praying that the path we're laying for them will guide them there and that they'll learn how to continue on it someday without us. There is no one right way.
Except, obviously, when it comes to pronouncing the word theater. All of which, of course, brings me to tuna salad.
There are many ways to make tuna salad. Many of them are passable, and some of them are even quite good, but there is actually only one fully right way to make it, which is the way my mother made it, and all of the other ways are just inferior. No judgment here, just truth.
To make the right kind of tuna salad first you have to buy cans of tuna in water. Bumblebee is best because that's what my mom always bought. You have to squeeze out the excess water before dumping the fish into a bowl. This step is kind of gross but absolutely can't be avoided. Next you have to chop celery into small pieces. Not too small, though. Half an arch should do, and if you don't know what I mean about that I'm sorry. The celery goes in the bowl with the tuna. Now add the juice of a lemon, or two, depending on the size and juiciness of the lemon, as well as so very much mayonnaise (Hellman's is best here) you have to close your eyes while you're spooning it or squeezing it in. Then comes salt and pepper--more grinds of pepper than you think you need. Mix it all really well and taste it and see if you need more mayo. You do.
Keep it in a sealed container in the fridge and use it for a tuna melt on a bagel. When it's Passover, eat it on matzah. When it's not Passover, eat it on everything else, like toast or pita chips or tortilla chips or crackers.
You'll probably make it again soon.
Sometimes it's okay for there to be just one right way to do things.
Sometimes it's easier that way.


Hans Prinzhorn: Artistry of the Mentally Ill 1922
Hans Prinzhorn was a psychiatrist and art historian who had worked with Emil Kraepelin at the University of Heidleberg on a collection of art by mentally disturbed patients. By 1921, when Prinzhorn left Heidleberg, this collection had grown to include over 5000 works by about 350 patients. Prinzhorn’s 1922 book Artistry of the Mentally Ill (profusely illustrated with images from the Heidelberg collection), was the first attempt to analyse this type of art, that subsequently became known as ‘Outsider Art’. Prinzhorn was interested in the borderline between psychiatry and art, mental illness and self-expression, and his work became very influential among artists, especially the Expressionists and Surrealists, with their interest in self expression and in visualising the working of the unconscious mind.
As most serious artists and designers are interested in the act of perception and cognition – the way we transmute the visual and other sensual input from the outside world into mental images – and how we then illustrate these images and evoke them with works of art, Prinzhorn’s book stands out as the first major study to analyse these issues. Of course we know much more now of the workings of the brain, and have begun to develop coherent theories of the Mind (see for example Marvin Minsky’s Society of Mind, and Daniel Dennet’s Consciousness Explained), but the issues addressed by Prinzhorn are still central to these developments. ‘Outsider Art’ is the label now used to describe the art of the mentally ill, the ‘naive’ work of untrained ‘folk artists’, the work of so-called primitive tribes and other similar artefacts, and remains a source of inspiration for artists, nor merely in the radically unconventional images that are produced by ‘outsiders’ but as evidence of these process of perception, cognition and expression that are central to all our experiences of art and design.
Other good books on this subject: Steven Rose: From Brains to Consciousness, Igor Aleksander: How to Build a Mind, and Margaret Boden: The Creative Mind.
Posted on June 2, 2014 June 2, 2014 Author bobcottonFormat ImageTags 1922, Art, book, Hans Prinzhorn, Mentally Ill 1 Comment


SEC Ordered to Turn Over Documents in Ripple Litigation
Pavan A Follow
United States District Court Judge Analisa Torres denied the SEC's second request for withholding documents about former Division Director William Hinman's speech.
In its legal battle with the SEC, the order marks a significant win for Ripple, since the story behind the speech may be able to undermine the SEC's core arguments. Hinman's speech at Yahoo Finance All Markets Summit in June 2018 is mainly reflected in the documents.
A court decision overturned the plaintiff's claim of attorney-client privilege by finding that the internal speech documents contain communications that primarily involve interpreting and applying legal principles.
According to the SEC, Ripple Labs' cryptocurrency, XRP, is secure because, in 2013, the company used it to raise funds. The SEC filed a lawsuit against the company and its current CEO, Brad Garlinghouse, and its previous CEO, Chris Larsen in December 2020.
According to Hinman, Ether, along with Bitcoin, is not a security, as he stated in his speech. Ripple is also facing a lawsuit by the SEC over whether the company sold XRP illegally years ago.?
Initially, it looked like Ripple was going downhill, and the company has engaged in a variety of defensive strategies to combat the charges. Ripple Labs and the Securities and Exchange Commission filed motions both on Sept. 17 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York for summary judgment.??
#SEC #Ripple #XRP
Pavan A


Articles / Iconography
Dr. Constantine Cavarnos
Photios Kontoglou: The Greatest Icon Painter of 20th Century Greece
Photios Kontoglou, the greatest icon painter of modern Greece and one of her most important theologians and literary writers, died in Athens on July 13, 1965. His death, during surgury, passed almost entirely unnoticed in America, even among Greek-Americans, but he was deeply mourned throughout Greece.
I was in Greece when he died and had the good fortune of seeing and talking with this great and holy man just five days before his “falling asleep.” The editor of an Athenian religious monthly asked me to write an obituary . . . I have undertaken to write this brief biography.
Photios Kontoglou was born on November 8, 1895, at Kydoniai (Aivali), on the west coast of Asia Minor, across from Mytilene. Kydoniai was a city consisting of about 30,000 Greeks and three persons—the district governor, the judge, and the tax collector—who were Turks.
Kontoglou came from a devout family, which had its own chapel containing precious articles including a carved ancient crucifix and a large panel icon depicting Saint Paraskevi. Many of his ancestors were monks, and an uncle, Stephanos Kontoglou, was abbot of the Monastery of Saint Paraskevi near Kydoniai. Stephanos was an important influence in Photios’s life. In his book Vasanta (1923), Kontoglou dedicates the chapter of translations from the Psalms of David “to the austere soul of the Hieromonk Stephanos Kontoglou, my uncle, whose virtue I perpetually have before me as a model and rule.”
The young Kontoglou was extremely fond of the sea, sailing, and the solitude of the deserted neighboring islets. He liked to live alone, like Robinson Crusoe. Daniel Defoe’s hero fascinated Kontoglou; he mentions him in many of his writings.
After graduating from the famous Academy of Gymnasium of Kydoniai, Kontoglou spent several years in Europe, especially in France, studying art and acquiring painting techniques. He lived in Paris during the First World War, where he first gained attention, winning prizes for his paintings and his writings. His first book, a novel entitled Pedro Cazas, was written and published there in 1919.
After the armistice, Kontoglou returned to Kydoniai. In 1920 he wrote a remarkable prologue for the second edition of Pedro Cazas which was published in Athens in 1922. In this prologue he set forth some of the basic ideas by which he abided ever after.
Persecuted by the Turks, he and his family went to Thermi, Mytilene, in 1922. Later he resided in Athens, but always lived on the outskirts, as he disliked the distractions of cities. When the Kontoglou family left Kydoniai, they took only the sacred articles mentioned above and a few Church books. These were his most cherished possessions. After his death his wife, Maria, fulfilling his wish, gave them to the Monastery of Saint Paraskevi at Nea Makri in Attica.
In Athens Kontoglou soon became well-known in literary circles as a result of his highly-praised book, Pedro Cazas. His reputation as a writer grew with the appearance of two additional books: Vasanta (a Sanskrit word meaning “springtime”) in 1923, and Taxidia (“Travels”) in 1928, and the literary and art periodical Filikh Etairia (“Friendly Society”) which he founded in 1925. Within a few years, Kontoglou had won an enviable place in the Greek world of letters, admired for his style—which is characterized by clarity, simplicity, vigor and warmth—as well as his remarkable observations and profound thoughts.
As a painter, Kontoglou was slow in winning recognition. He had to overcome difficult obstacles. After leaving Europe, he became increasingly impressed by the Byzantine traditions of painting and decided to master this style of painting. But he had to become his own teacher and learn the secrets of Byzantine art. He did this by reading old manuscripts and visiting Byzantine monuments, patiently studying the works of the old masters.
Further, Kontoglou had to overcome strong prejudice on the part of the public against Byzantine art. Having won their liberation from the Turks, the Greeks began to turn the West for prototypes in art, especially the adoption of European (particularly Italian Renaissance) models and techniques. According to the European view at that time, Byzantine civilization was a lower civilization, not worthy of serious study, and Byzantine art especially was lower, almost barbaric art. Kontoglou succeeded magnificently in overcoming both obstacles, but it took time.
The first obstacle was by far easier to overcome. He learned his most important lessons about Byzantine art at the Holy Mountain of Athos and at Mystra. It is significant that while at Athos, he wrote several chapters, the preface and profound concluding chapter on the fine arts of his second book, Vasanta. It was also at Athos that one of his three poems in this book was inspired by a Byzantine painting in a very old chapel there. His debt to Athos in his development as an iconographer is evinced by a volume published in 1925 containing photographs of copies, executed by him, of Byzantine frescoes at Athos; and also by the illustrations in two issues of Filikh Etairia that year showing panel icons of the Monastery of Iviron rendered by him.
Kontoglou visited Mystra not long after. He made copies of some of the wall paintings in the Byzantine churches at Mystra. He later worked there for a long time cleaning wall paintings in the Church of Peribleptos.
Comparing Byzantine and European religious art, Kontoglou says in his book Taxidia, “In the countries of Europe there are churches with paintings that are famous for their artistic merit; yet they do not have the mystery and the power of evoking contrition (katanyxis) possessed by the icons that were done by some unlettered and simple Byzantine painters.”
Around 1930, Kontoglou was appointed technical supervisor at the Byzantine Museum in Athens. He possessed both great love for the works in the museum, and technical knowledge for cleaning and preserving them.
In 1932, Kontoglou published a slender volume entitled Icones et Fresques d’Art Byzantine, with twenty plates of Byzantine panel icons and frescoes he copied. He continued to paint panel icons during this period.
During the later thirties, Kontoglou decorated three large rooms of the City Hall of Athens with historical frescoes. This was his first large scale work as a fresco painter, and his only extensive secular one. His next major achievement as a fresco painter was the iconographic decoration of the large Church Zoodochos Peghi at Liopesi (Paiania), a town near Athens. He began the work in 1939, but could not resume it until after the Second World War. When I met Kontoglou in 1952, he showed me the beautiful Byzantine murals he had painted at Liopesi.
Kontoglou wrote at least eight books between 1942 and 1945, during the war. Most are rather short. The longest and important is Mystikos Kepos (“Mystical Garden”) in 1944. His chapters on Piety (Theosveia) and Saint Isaac the Syrian are masterpieces, full of deep religious feeling. He speaks of other remarkable ascetics of Syria and Mesopotamia, and stresses the virtues of faith, humility and purity.
The most fruitful period for Kontoglou, as both painter and writer, was the last twenty years of his life. Assisted by several of his talented pupils, he painted numerous panel icons in churches in many parts of Greece, as well as in the United States and other countries, and many thousands of square yards of wall paintings. After the church at Liopesi, mentioned above, Kontoglou frescoed the entire interior of the Church of Saint Andrew off Patission Street at Athens. He did wall paintings for the new Metropolitan Church of Evangelismos in Rhodes and the Church of Saint George at Stemnitsa, Arcadia. Finally, he decorated with fresco icons the eastern apse, central dome, pendentives and barrel vaults below the dome, and other surfaces of the following Athenian churches: Kapnikarea, Saint George at Kypseli, Saint Haralambos in the park Pedion tou Areos, Saint Nicholas at Kato Patissia, and others.
Through these works, through the training of many gifted young artists in the techniques of Byzantine iconography, and through his long, luminous and spirited defense of Byzantine art which culminated in 1961 in the monumental two-volume work entitled Ekphrasis (“Expression”) in which he teaches the theory and practice of Byzantine iconography, Kontoglou succeeded in making this art prevail in Greece. His influence spread to America, where many churches have been decorated with panel icons, frescoes and mosaics by his pupils.
During the same period, he wrote such edifying books as A Great Sign (1945), with accounts of many extraordinary recent miracles at Thermi, Mytilene; The Life and Conduct of Blaise Pascal (1947); The Life and Ascesis of Our Holy Father Saint Mark the Anchorite (1947, translated in The Orthodox Word, no. 1, Sept.-Oct., 1966, with illustrations by Kontoglou); Fount of Life (1951), presenting brief descriptions of the lives and selections from the teachings of some of the great Saints of the Orthodox Church; The Holy Gospel According to Matthew, Interpreted (1952); Expression (1961); and What Orthodoxy Is and What Papism Is (1964). Kontoglou also translated into Greek Leonid Ouspensky’s L’Icone: Quelques Mots sur son Sens Dogmatique, and published it with a preface and notes of his own. Together with the young theologian Basil Moustakis, Kontoglou founded and edited Kivotos (1952–1955), a religious periodical concerned especially with Orthodox spirituality.
Kontoglou contributed many articles to various other periodicals and encyclopedias. His articles in the Athenian daily Elephtheria are so numerous that they would fill several volumes. Many of them are among the most profound written by a Greek. Most are concerned with religious themes, such as faith and reason, religion and philosophy, religious versus secular art, Byzantine iconography and music, the lives of Martyrs and other Saints, and so on.
Kontoglou won the Academy of Athens Prize for his book Ekphrasis, in 1961, and the Purfina Prize for his book Aivali; My Native Place, in 1963. The latter is the first volume of his Erga (“Works”) which began to be published by Astir Publishing Company at Athens in 1962.
In recognition of his great achievements as an author, the Academy of Athens, the highest cultural institution in Greece, awarded him on March 24, 1965, its Aristeion Grammaton, its highest prize in letters.
Kontoglou also carried on an enormous correspondence. He once told me that he wrote about fifty letters a month, corresponding not only with Greeks, but also Americans, Finns, Frenchmen, Germans, Russians, Ugandans and others. He had countless friends and admirers throughout the world who sought his guidance on iconography, and on Orthodox doctrine and living.
In Kontoglou’s writings, we encounter a man who has unshakable religious faith, free from all skepticism and metaphysical anguish. We encounter a man who is steeped in the Holy Scriptures and writings of the Eastern Church Fathers, particularly the great mystics such as Saint Macarios the Egyptian, Saint John Climacos, Saint Isaac the Syrian, Saint Symeon the New Theologian, and Saint Gregory the Sinaite. We find a man who has the profoundest respect for the Sacred Tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy, including all its dogmas, canons and sacred arts (architecture, iconography, music), tolerating no deviations. Orthodoxy was for him the sacred Kivotos, the sacred Ark, and these its precious contents, which must be carefully guarded and not cast away, or exchanged for counterfeits.
Kontoglou was strongly opposed to the participation of Orthodoxy in “ecumenism,” seeing in such participation the dangers of compromise on matters which admit of no compromise. He was especially critical of the maneuvers of Patriarch Athenagoras, in whom he saw an apostate . . . a betrayer of Greece and Orthodoxy. In his last book, entitled Ti Einai he Orthodoxia kai ti Einai ho Papismos (“What Orthodoxy Is and What Papsim Is”) Kontoglou stressed the abyss that separates Orthodoxy from Roman Catholicism, which renders utterly absurd Athenagoras’s assertions that there are no real differences between the two.
Kontoglou was a man of adamantine Orthodox faith and impeccable character, adorned with the virtues of great humility, long-suffering, courage, wisdom, purity, hope and love. He was a devout man, a holy man, a man of God. All that he did bears the impress of these qualities.
As during his life, so at his death, it was evident that Kontoglou was free from worldly attachments, a citizen of the City of God, not of the earthly city, whose glory is temporary and whose power is doomed to pass away. He died poor, ignored by the State. His body was not accompanied to the grave by any State dignitaries, but only by friends and admirers, who loved him deeply.
This article was originally published by the Monastery of St. John, www.monasteryofstjohn.org, in The Divine Ascent Vol. 3/4. This and other publications can be found on their bookstore website, www.stjohnsbookstore.com. This article was posted here with permission.