How the climate has change

One of the delights of having a messy office is that you sometimes stumble upon an entertaining piece of paper. For example, on 8th November 1990, The Times published a piece by its science editor under the headline “Is this really a scientist speaking?”

It was about a speech that the then Prime Minister, a certain Margaret Thatcher, had given to the World Climate Conference. The Times piece quotes her as saying “We must not waste time and energy disputing the report of the Inter Governmental Panel on Climatic Change, or debating the right machinery for making progress.”

The science editor took issue with this, complaining that, for all her claims to have a background in science, “Somewhere along the way,” Mrs Thatcher “seems to have abandoned her scientific scepticism and adopted the simple clichés of the environmental activists.” He then goes on to write “There are many things in the IPCC report that must be disputed, energetically. As a scientific hypothesis, man-made global warming is plausible but unproven.”

Even a quarter of a century ago, that was a pretty brave statement, although one that appeared more often than you might think. Today, it seems almost quaint.

The closing paragraph, after complaining that the whole scare was based on dodgy models, is chilling, though. “A couple of cold winters will take the froth off the debate, and allow us the time we need to discover whether or not the earth is really warming up. Meanwhile, the overheated rhetoric in Geneva is premature and potentially very damaging.”

We didn’t get those cold winters. Snow is a novelty for many young children living in southern parts of the UK. We did get a run of the hottest summers on record. So perhaps the problem was that the rhetoric in Geneva was not hot enough.

Graphene wired – atom by atom, and other stories

It can take just one chemical bond to make an electrical connection to a graphene ribbon. Researchers at Aalto University in Finland and Utrecht University in the Netherlands did this with “single atom contacts between gold and graphene nanoribbons”.

The researchers describe their work in a paper in Nature Communications, sadly, hidden behind a paywall. Fortunately, the people behind the research are so enthused about their work that they have produced a press release. This points out the small at which graphene electronics can work, less than 10 nanometres. “This means that the graphene nanostructures have to be only a few tens of atoms in width.” 

The experiments described in the paper, “Suppression of electron-vibron coupling in graphene nanoribbons contacted via a single atom” showed how to do this. The research involved using atomic force microscopy and scanning tunnelling microscopy “to map the structure of the graphene nanoribbons with atomic resolution”.

The most significant discovery, they say, is that “a single chemical bond forms an electronically transparent contact with the graphene nanoribbon”. They conclude that this finding “may be the key to using graphene nanostructures in future electronic devices, as the contact does not change the intrinsic ribbon properties”.

Tie a graphene ribbon round your battery

Problems with lithium ion (LI) batteries may have given Boeing a headache, but this popular energy store has plenty of fans and down to earth applications. Now researchers at Rice University in Houston, Texas, have come up with a new way of enhancing the efficiency of the LI battery. Their idea, according to the university’s press release, is to employ ribbons of graphene that start as carbon nanotubes.

The researchers made anodes out of graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) and tin oxide. (The anode is the bolt hole for the lithium ions, which move to the cathode as the battery discharges.) This novel anode material, “showed an initial capacity better than the theoretical capacity of tin oxide alone”.

It will cost you US$35 to read the paper in ACS Nano, “Graphene Nanoribbon and Nanostructured SnO2 Composite Anodes for Lithium Ion Batteries”. (If it is worth writing a press release, isn’t it also worth providing free access to potential readers?)  So we have to rely on what the release says for signs of the true significance of the research. This claims that “After 50 charge-discharge cycles, the test units retained a capacity that was still more than double that of the graphite currently used for LI battery anodes.”

As much as anything, the team sees the work as a testbed for applications of GNRs, a fertile area of research for our wonder material. A member of the group, Jian Lin, a postdoctoral researcher at Rice, describes the research as “starting point for exploring the composites made from GNRs and other transition metal oxides for lithium storage applications.”

The Manchester PR machine rolls on

There was an odd story in the Financial Times this week. The print edition carried the tag “Graphene research” but there wasn’t much of that in sight. The on-line version makes it appear even more graphene oriented, with its title “Graphene breakthrough shows Manchester’s science credentials”. In reality it was mostly a gushing piece about Manchester University and its commercialisation of research that goes on there.

The peg for the articles seems to have been the recent press release that we flagged up earlier in the week (see Manchester untied). That was all about magnetism in graphene. Only time will tell us whether or not the paper described there was, as the FT dubs it, another “breakthrough”, but it is certainly a breakthrough in PR.  What on earth do we make of the statement that “The university is also home to Professor Brian Cox, the physicist and broadcaster, Sir John Sulston, the Nobel Prize winner who was involved in decoding the human genome, and Jeanette Winterson, the novelist.”

The FT’s article also has some numbers that do not seem to have any relationship with the graphene bit of the story. What do we make of the information that “the university had won £200m in research funding in the first 10 months of the academic year”? How much for graphene?

Then there is the bit that says that the university’s “£32m spin-out fund is funding several attempts to find commercial uses for graphene”. How much of that money has gone into graphene? Can’t they tell us something about those investments?

After all, the writer just needed to read some back issues of the FT. It was on in January that Clive Cookson wrote the article Graphene: Faster, stronger, bendier. This mentioned one of the Manchester businesses, Graphene Industries. Over on the university;s own site, the paper’s journalist could have read the PDF file that describes the launch, last February, of another company, 2-­DTech Ltd.

Manchester is a fine university, one of the best, and has an excellent record in knowledge transfer, the sometimes fraught business of getting research into the hands of people who can make money out of it. And you can hardly blame it for the FT’s decision to write something as baffling as this, with its strange mixture of graphene researcher, general university background and throwaway comments from the likes of Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google.

Heavy metal and the graphene connection

The eyebrows rise when a paper begins “Heavy metal ions and humic acid (HA) in underground water pose a severe threat to public health and ecological systems”. Lots of buzz words in there to appeal to a science watcher. Throw in the title of the paper, “Synergistic Removal of Pb(II), Cd(II) and Humic Acid by Fe3O4@Mesoporous Silica-Graphene Oxide Composites”, and you ask yourself what is graphene doing in there?

The paper appears in PLOS One, a peer reviewed open access journal, so anyone can read it and work out for themselves what is going on. It is about hierarchically structured composites containing polyethylenimine-modified magnetic mesoporous silica and graphene oxide (MMSP-GO), whatever they are. The good bit appears to be that “MMSP-GO composites have shown promise for use as adsorbents in the simultaneous removal of heavy metals and humic acid in wastewater treatment processes.”

So you can add cleaning up the environment to graphene’s repertoire.

This blog is a random sample of the many stories on graphene that gush by. Think of it as a poor person's alternative to the expensive newsletters that you can subscribe to from commercial organisations that really do know what they are talking about. 

A far from green bamboo computer

How one company’s plans to make a green computer caused a headache for the recyclers.

When the computer company Dell wanted to “go green” it alighted on “bamboo” as a neat environmentally friendly material. Had Dell stuck to what it called" “Nature’s Eco-friendly Packaging Solution” for the boxes that keep hardware safe during transit there might have been no complaints. After all, as it proclaimed, you can just “Toss that Bamboo Packaging into the Compost Pile”.

Unfortunately, the company’s designers didn’t stop there. In 2008, they launched what Dell called an “eco computer”, with a case made out of a bamboo based material that looks and behaves just like the ABS polymers used in other computers. You can’t just add that to your vegetable waste and throw it on the compost heap.

Nat Hunter, co-director for Design at the RSA (the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce), tells of going to a recycling plant in Kent. The plant takes old PCs and subjects them to “big rock crushers” – a wrecking ball – to reduce the obsolete computers to piles of rubble, a materials mine.

The waste then goes through sorting line to separate out the different materials for recycling. Unfortunately, Hunter explained at a recent meeting, the sorting system cannot tell the difference between the bamboo plastic and ordinary ABS plastic and shoves it into the same receptacle, thus polluting the real polymer waste.

As Hunter says, the bamboo PC completely failed in its attempts to be ‘eco friendly’. You buy it as a green computer but it ends up being "very problematic" for the recycling industry.

Hunter was talking about Dell’s foray into panda territory at a meeting put on by, among others, the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST). The meeting, back in January, marked publication of a POST Note Maximising the Value of Recycled Materials. Much of the event – more details here in a piece I wrote for the Materials Research Society in the USA – dealt with the business of recycling plastic, which often entails sorting a pile of mixed polymers, an increasingly sophisticated task made more difficult if the mixture harbours a polymer that masquerades as something else.

Hunter, who is a part of the team behind The Great Recovery – Redesigning the future, a project funded by the Technology Strategy Board, tackled a broader theme, designing manufactured goods to be green from the start. She takes the line that “waste really is a design flaw”.

Designers need to put a lot more effort into thinking about the fate of their products. Dell isn’t the only electronics company in her sights. Hunter, who has spent time watching the recyclers in action, also tells the tale of TVs from Philips that comes with 300 screws holding it together, “all of them different”. By contrast, Samsung makes TVs with half as many screws, all of them the same. Much easier to dismantle.

A lethargic green writer

There has always been a chasm between the stuff written by medical correspondents and "health writers" on many newspapers. The former are specialist science writers whose beat includes the latest goings on on medical research. This is territory that is also the natural habitat of many science writers with a broader remit. Now, it seems, we have to find some way to differentiate environment correspondents from "green writers".

Just as health writers will cover any old tosh that deals with the human body, be it quack remedies or copper bracelets that cure snoring, while medical writers want some science behind their articles, we had always thought that an environment writer also built on scientific foundations. Indeed, many science writers also cover the environment which is, after all, a highly scientific subject.

Evidence that the green writers do not need this underpinning of science comes in the shape on an article that appeared in The Independent, My war on electrosmog by Julia Stephenson. The article is yet another in the saga of slow death by electromagnetic radiation that surfaces from time to time around mobile phones and, more recently, wifi. Ms Stephenson, whose own embryonic web site verges on the cleavage side of photography, has been feeling tired of late. Even her plants are in a bad way.

The self styled "Green Goddess" consulted her naturopath who "insisted that my exhaustion was caused by electromagnetic "smog" in my flat". Apart from finding it dodgy that anyone writing on such matters should consult a naturopath, I am puzzled that she also feels the need to talk to a "London-based complementary health practitioner". Ms Stephenson quotes Dr Nicole de Canha as saying "Any imbalance in our electromagnetic field creates a disturbance in cell structure and function, which can lead to illness in sensitive individuals."

Where, we have to ask, did Dr de Canha acquire that PhD? Therapynet, which seems to be a place for such folks to advertise their magic, tells us little beyond saying that the good doctor has a Doctorate in Homoeopathy, as well as Sports and Therapeutic Massage Diploma, Indian Head Massage, Ear Acupuncture Diploma. There is a link to Relax-O-Therapy but the website wasn't there when we clicked it.

It is depressing that a newspaper as solid as The Independent carries this sort of tosh. Perhaps the one saving grace is that they file it under "Lifestyle".

Cool response to global warming

You may have thought that the media went into overdrive on the recent IPCC report on climate change. Some observers beg to differ. Matthew Nisbet, Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at American University, reckons that "The inability of the IPCC report to break through to the public about the urgency of climate change is just more evidence that relying on traditional science communication strategies has increasingly limited returns."

He explains his stance in A “Two Step Flow of Popularization” for Climate Change. His line is that "other public engagement methods are sorely needed".

Why? Partly because of some fundamental errors. As he says, "the Friday scheduling of the report's release couldn't have been worse".

You can always argue about when best to launch something. I always suggested something that gave the weeklies – Nature, New Scientist, Science, The Economist etc – a chance to dive in with their usually deeper analysis. Governments certainly like Friday for bad news stories because readers' minds are on other things.

Then there is the report itself. By being "a technical backgrounder, a massive synthesis of the state of climate science" this means that, for journalists, "an authoritative distillation of past research [is] a tough story to make exciting. The there is the fact that "the main themes of the draft report had been predicted for a few months, eliminating any real surprises".

Lots of leads to similar assessment so the media coverage. Well worth reading. His view that those seeking to get the message across should look beyond the media makes sense. But then it is much harder to tell if the report has had any impact. Indeed, maybe the very methods that he advocates really happened. It just won't show up in the headlines. Which is where we came in.

Another tree or two saved from the paper mill

So many publications are rushing into electronic only versions that it is hardly news. One, though, caught our attention when it appeared in the Romeike Daily Media Bulletin.

We read there that:

The Waste Paper Magazine is no longer available in print. From this month, the newsletter covering sustainable waste management is available online at http://www.crn.org.uk/wastepaper and is updated on a monthly basis.

With that title, you wonder why they bothered with dead trees in the first place.