Saturday, November 29, 2025
Soft hybrid material turns motion into power—without toxic lead - Energy & Green Tech - Hi Tech & Innovation
A
crystal of the newly discovered piezoelectric material viewed under a
microscope. Credit: University of Birmingham/University of Oxford
Scientists
have developed a new material that converts motion into electricity
(piezoelectricity) with greater efficiency and without using toxic lead—paving
the way for a new generation of devices that we use in everyday life.
Publishing their discovery in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, researchers
from the University of Birmingham, University of Oxford, and University of
Bristol describe a material that is both durable and sensitive to
movement—opening possibilities for a wide range of innovative devices such as
sensors, wearable electronics, and self-powered devices.
Based on bismuth iodide, an inorganic
salt with low toxicity, the new soft, hybrid material rivals the performance of
traditional lead-based ceramics but with lower toxicity and easier processing.
It contains no lead compared to existing high-performance alternatives such as
PZT (lead zirconate titanate), which is 60% lead, and can be produced at room
temperature rather than 1,000°C.
Piezoelectric materials generate
electric charge when pressed or bent and can also deform when an electric field
is applied. They are essential to technologies ranging from precision
actuators—used in products like camera autofocus and inkjet printer pumps—to
energy-harvesting sensors built into wearable technology like fitness trackers,
smart clothing, and car airbag systems.
Lead author Dr. Esther Hung, from the
University of Oxford's Department of Physics who led the research, said,
"By fine-tuning the interactions between the organic and inorganic
components, we were able to create a delicate structural instability that
breaks symmetry in just the right way.
"This interplay between order and
disorder is what gives the material its exceptional piezoelectric response.
It's a different approach to piezoelectricity than in traditional materials
such as lead zirconate titanate (PZT), and that's what's led to these big
improvements."
The global piezoelectric materials
market is worth over $35 billion and continues to grow rapidly—driven by demand
in automotive, health care, robotics, and consumer electronics, where devices
that convert motion into electricity or precise movement are essential.
Researchers at the University of
Birmingham used single-crystal X-ray diffraction and solid-state nuclear
magnetic resonance (NMR) to understand the material's behavior.
They found that the way that organic and inorganic parts stick together through halogen bonding can be used to change when and how the material changes its structure, as well as improve piezoelectric performance. This understanding could also be useful for enhancing piezoelectric performance in other materials that combine organic and inorganic elements.
From left, Dr. Benjamin M. Gallant, Dr. Dominik J. Kubicki and Dr. Shrestha Banerjee in front of a solid-state NMR instrument in the Molecular Sciences Building at the University of Birmingham. Credit: University of Birmingham/University of Oxford
Dr.
Benjamin Gallant from the University of Birmingham, who led the NMR study,
said, "As an early career researcher, it's exciting to participate in
research with the power to transform our society—almost every device we use in
our daily lives contains piezoelectrics."
The research was jointly supervised by
Professor Henry Snaith (Oxford), Dr. Harry Sansom (Bristol), and Dr. Dominik
Kubicki (Birmingham), bringing together expertise in new materials, crystal
design, and atomic-level structure characterization.
Dr. Dominik Kubicki from the University
of Birmingham said, "With performance comparable to commercial
piezoelectrics but made from non-toxic bismuth, this discovery is a new pathway
toward environmentally responsible technologies that can power sensors, medical
implants, and flexible electronics of the future."
Source: Soft hybrid material turns motion into power—without toxic lead
Air pollution may reduce health benefits of exercise - Health - Sports medicine & Kinesiology
Credit:
Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain
Long-term exposure to toxic air can substantially weaken the health
benefits of regular exercise, suggests a new study by an international team
including UCL (University College London) researchers.
The study, published in the journal BMC Medicine, analyzed data
from more than 1.5 million adults tracked for more than a decade in countries
including the U.K., Taiwan, China, Denmark and the United States.
The team found that the protective effect of regular exercise on people's
risk of dying over a specific period—from any cause and from cancer and heart
disease specifically—appeared to be reduced, but not eliminated, for those who
lived in high pollution areas.
The researchers looked at levels of fine particulate matter—tiny particles
known as PM2.5 with a diameter of less than 2.5 micrometers across. These particles
are so small they can get stuck in the lungs and enter the bloodstream.
Impact of pollution on exercise benefits
The health benefits of exercise significantly weakened, the team found,
where the yearly average level of PM2.5 was 25 micrograms per cubic
meter (μg/m³) or higher. Nearly half (46%) of the world's population live in areas
exceeding this threshold.
The lead researcher, Professor Po-Wen Ku of National Chung Hsing
University, Taiwan, said, "Our findings emphasize that exercise remains
beneficial even in polluted environments. However, improving air quality can
greatly enhance these health gains."
Co-author Professor Andrew Steptoe, from UCL's Department of Behavioral
Science & Health, said, "Our study shows that toxic air can to some
extent block the benefits of exercise, although not eliminate them. The
findings are further evidence of the damage that fine particle pollution can do
to our health.
"We believe clean air and physical activity are both important
for healthy aging and so we encourage greater
efforts to curb health-harming pollution levels."
Study methodology and key findings
For the study, the research team looked at data from seven existing
studies, including three that were unpublished, combining the summary
statistics from each study into one overall analysis. For three of these
studies, they re-analyzed the raw data at the level of individual participants.
Combining the data from seven studies, they found that people who did at
least two and a half hours of moderate or vigorous exercise a week had a 30%
lower risk of dying during the study period than those who did not meet this
exercise threshold.
However, if people in this very physically active group lived in an area
with high fine particle pollution (above 25 μg/m³), this reduction in risk
halved to 12%–15%.
At higher levels of fine particle pollution, above 35 μg/m³, the
benefits of exercise weakened further, particularly for risk of death from
cancer, where the benefits were no longer robust. About a third of the world's
population (36%) live in areas whose yearly average PM2.5 levels
exceed 35 μg/m³.
For study participants in the U.K., the average yearly PM2.5 levels
were lower than these thresholds, at 10 μg/m³. However, levels of fine
particle pollution vary a lot and spikes in pollution in U.K. cities do exceed
25 μg/m³, the critical threshold identified in the study, mainly during the
winter months.
Co-author Professor Paola Zaninotto, from UCL's Department of Epidemiology
& Public Health, said, "We don't want to discourage people from
exercising outdoors. Checking air quality, choosing cleaner routes, or easing
off intensity on polluted days can help you get the most health benefits from
your exercise."
Study limitations and research team
In their section on limitations, the authors noted that the study was
mostly conducted in high-income countries, so the findings might not apply to
low-income countries where fine particle pollution is higher, often exceeding
50 μg/m³. Other limitations included a lack of data on indoor air quality as
well as participants' diets.
However, a wide variety of other factors were accounted for, including
income and education levels, health behaviors such as smoking, and the presence
or not of existing chronic diseases.
The study involved researchers from the U.K., the United States, Australia, and Asia. For the U.K. part of the study, the researchers used data from the UK Biobank.
Provided by University College London
Source: Air pollution may reduce health benefits of exercise
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Friday, November 28, 2025
NASA’s Mars-bound ESCAPADE Mission Captures First ‘Selfies’ - UNIVERSE
ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers)
About a week after its launch, NASA’s
ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) mission has
already captured its first images: a pair of self-portraits showing part of the
spacecraft as the twin explorers speed away from Earth.
On Nov. 21, one of the two ESCAPADE
spacecraft used its Visible and Infrared Observation System (VISIONS) cameras,
provided by Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, to capture these images,
showing part of a solar panel on the spacecraft.
These images show the side of a solar panel on one of
NASA’s two ESCAPADE spacecraft. The image on the left is from the spacecraft’s
visible-light camera. The image on the right was taken with its infrared
camera, showing which parts of the array are warmer (yellow and orange) and
cooler (purple and black). The images were taken on Nov. 21, 2025, just eight
days after the mission launched.
NASA/UCB-SSL/RL/NAU-Radiant/Lucint
The images prove the cameras are working
well. The visible-light image also suggests that the spacecraft should have the
sensitivity to image Martian aurora from orbit. The infrared camera will be
used at Mars to better understand how materials on the surface heat up and cool
down during Mars’ day-night cycle and over the planet’s seasons.
The second ESCAPADE spacecraft also
successfully took its first photos, but it was targeted toward deep space, so
the images were simply black.
The twin ESCAPADE spacecraft, built by
Rocket Lab and ultimately bound for Mars, launched on Nov. 13 aboard a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket from Cape
Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Once the ESCAPADE spacecraft reach
Mars, they will study how a million-mile-per-hour stream of material flowing
from the Sun, known as the solar wind, interacts with the Martian environment
and how that drives atmospheric loss at the Red Planet.
Before they head for Mars, though, the
two spacecraft are following a “loiter” or “Earth-proximity” orbit around a
location in space about a million miles from Earth called Lagrange point 2. In
November 2026, they will return to Earth to use our planet’s gravity to
slingshot their way to Mars. They will arrive at the Red Planet in September
2027.
by
Vanessa Thomas
NASA’s Goddard Space
Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Source: NASA’s Mars-bound ESCAPADE Mission Captures First ‘Selfies’ - NASA Science
Reducing social media use for just a week can improve mental health - Psychology & Psychiatry
In a new study, published in JAMA
Network Open, 295 participants report promising mental health benefits
after reducing their social media usage for a week. The cohort consisted of
young adults from the ages of 18 to 24—the age group commonly associated with
the highest social media usage, as well as a heightened risk of mental health
issues.
Although many self-reports have surfaced online indicating that reducing
social media use has been beneficial in various ways, the scientific link
between social media use and youth mental health is still debated, with past
studies showing mixed results.
Measuring social media usage
Prior research on social media usage often relied on self-reported
estimates of measures like screen time, communication habits, sleep patterns,
and physical activity, but these kinds of self reports can be biased, leading
to unreliable results. Objective, real-time data on social media use can
provide a far more realistic picture of the impact of social media on mental
health.
So, to reduce bias introduced by self-reported usage, the study team used a
method referred to as "digital phenotyping"—where participants
passively tracked their app usage, GPS, accelerometer, and screenstate with
their smartphones and reported these to the team.
A baseline assessment consisted of a two-week data collection period before
reducing social media. Then participants collected and reported their data
during a one-week period in which they attempted their "social media
detox," where they were advised to limit activity on Facebook, Instagram,
Snapchat, TikTok, and X (formerly Twitter). Throughout the three-week period,
all participants took daily in-the-moment self-reports of mental health with
ecological momentary assessments (EMA).
Improvements—especially for problematic social media
use
On average, the week-long social media detox led to a 16.1% reduction in
anxiety, 24.8% reduction in depression, and a 14.5% reduction in insomnia
symptoms among the cohort, according to their self-reported measures of mental
health. While 6.2% of participants did not use social media at all during the
detox period, the average usage went from 1.9 hours per day to 0.5 hours during
the social media detox period.
However, there was a lot of variation in improvement. The study authors
note that problematic use of social
media, like addictive use and negative social comparison, was found to be
significantly associated with worse mental health outcomes. Those with
problematic use to begin with experienced overall greater improvements with
limited use.
The team writes, "We speculate that the improvements observed during
detox were associated more with a reduction in opportunities for problematic
engagement, such as negative social comparison and addictive use, rather than
by reductions in overall screen time, consistent with our findings showing
lesser associations between objective screen time and mental health
outcomes."
Notably, the study found no significant change in reported loneliness
during the detox period. The study authors attribute this to the fact that
social media often plays a role in social connection and community.
Biased results?
Although bias was limited in app usage reporting, the study was not immune
to other forms of bias. The major one being self-selection into the detox
group. Participants volunteered for the study and were likely aware of the
expected outcome beforehand. This may lead to biased results. In addition, the
study did not include a long-term follow-up or randomized control group.
The study authors are well aware of the limitations of the study, but they
say the results are still useful and indicate that social media reduction could
be a beneficial part of mental health therapy.
The study authors write, "These findings suggest that reducing social media use for 1 week may improve mental health outcomes in young adults; however, the durability of these therapeutic outcomes and their associations with behavior require further investigation."
Source: Reducing social media use for just a week can improve mental health
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