Scilence

'Pomegranate-inspired' Batteries

An electrode designed like a pomegranate – with silicon nanoparticles clustered like seeds in a tough carbon rind – overcomes several remaining obstacles to using silicon for a new generation of lithium-ion batteries. , say its inventors at Stanford University and the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
"While a couple of challenges remain, this design brings us closer to using silicon anodes in smaller, lighter and more powerful batteries for products like cell phones, tablets and electric cars," wrote  Yi Cui, an associate professor at Stanford and SLAC who led the research,  in Nature Nanotechnology.
"Experiments showed our pomegranate-inspired anode operates at 97 percent capacity even after 1,000 cycles of charging and discharging, which puts it well within the desired range for commercial operation."
The anode, or negative electrode, is where energy is stored when a battery charges. Silicon anodes could store 10 times more charge than the graphite anodes in today's rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, but they also have major drawbacks: The brittle silicon swells and falls apart during battery charging, and it reacts with the battery's electrolyte to form gunk that coats the anode and degrades its performance.

What do women want? It depends on time of month

If she loves you and then she loves you not, don't blame the petals of that daisy. Blame evolution.
UCLA researchers analyzed dozens of published and unpublished studies on how women's preferences for mates change throughout the menstrual cycle. Their findings suggest that ovulating women have evolved to prefer mates who display sexy traits -- such as a masculine body type and facial features, dominant behaviour and certain scents -- but not traits typically desired in long-term mates.
So, desires for those masculine characteristics, which are thought to have been markers of high genetic quality in our male ancestors, don't last all month -- just the few days in a woman's cycle when she is most likely to pass on genes that, eons ago, might have increased the odds of her offspring surviving and reproducing.
"Women sometimes get a bad rap for being fickle, but the changes they experience are not arbitrary," wrote Martie Haselton, a professor of psychology and communication studies at UCLA and the paper's senior author. "Women experience intricately patterned preference shifts even though they might not serve any function in the present."
The findings will appear online this month in Psychological Bulletin, which is published by the American Psychological Association.

Brain's 'sweet spot' for love found

A region deep inside the brain controls how quickly people make decisions about love, according to new research at the University of Chicago.
The finding, made in an examination of a 48-year-old man who suffered a stroke, provides the first causal clinical evidence that an area of the brain called the anterior insula "plays an instrumental role in love," wrote UChicago neuroscientist Stephanie Cacioppo, lead author of the study in the journal Current Trends in Neurology.
In this study, the patient made decisions normally about lust but showed slower reaction times when making decisions about love, in contrast to neurologically typical participants matched on age, gender and ethnicity.
"This distinction has been interpreted to mean that desire is a relatively concrete representation of sensory experiences, while love is a more abstract representation of those experiences," wrote Cacioppo, a research associate and assistant professor in psychology. The new data suggest that the posterior insula, which affects sensation and motor control, is implicated in feelings of lust or desire, while the anterior insula has a role in the more abstract representations involved in love.

Money makes parenting less meaningful

Money and parenting don't mix. That's according to new research that suggests that merely thinking about money diminishes the meaning people derive from parenting. The study is one among a growing number that identifies when, why, and how parenthood is associated with happiness or misery.
The research led by Kostadin Kushlev of the University of British Columbia sought to determine which aspects of life might influence how much pleasure and pain people got out of being parents. They specifically looked at the influence of wealth on meaning in parenthood.
In one recently published study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, they found that having a higher socioeconomic status lowers people's sense of meaning while taking care of their children but not during other daily activities. In a field study in the same paper, they found that showing people images of money while filling out a questionnaire at a festival with their children also reduced their levels of meaning in life.
Furthermore, they found this effect most pronounced in women. "Money seems to compromise meaning for mothers but not for fathers when they are spending time with their children," Kushlev wrote.