Residents of the county's unincorporated areas will receive a 35 percent discount on flood insurance starting April 1.

In one example, the Government Accountability Office said AI can complete some types of analysis for flood modeling “about 1,000 times faster" than what's been done historically.

The former president easily won the first-in-the-nation caucuses with calls for "energy dominance."

The GOP nominating process is moving on from the Hawkeye State. Voters still aren’t sure where candidates stand on carbon pipelines.

Potential successors include Kerry deputy Sue Biniaz, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and longtime political operative John Podesta.

A key chemical reaction — in which the movement of protons between the surface of an electrode and an electrolyte drives an electric current — is a critical step in many energy technologies, including fuel cells and the electrolyzers used to produce hydrogen gas.

For the first time, MIT chemists have mapped out in detail how these proton-coupled electron transfers happen at an electrode surface. Their results could help researchers design more efficient fuel cells, batteries, or other energy technologies.

“Our advance in this paper was studying and understanding the nature of how these electrons and protons couple at a surface site, which is relevant for catalytic reactions that are important in the context of energy conversion devices or catalytic reactions,” says Yogesh Surendranath, a professor of chemistry and chemical engineering at MIT and the senior author of the study.

Among their findings, the researchers were able to trace exactly how changes in the pH of the electrolyte solution surrounding an electrode affect the rate of proton motion and electron flow within the electrode.

MIT graduate student Noah Lewis is the lead author of the paper, which appears today in Nature Chemistry. Ryan Bisbey, a former MIT postdoc; Karl Westendorff, an MIT graduate student; and Alexander Soudackov, a research scientist at Yale University, are also authors of the paper.

Passing protons

Proton-coupled electron transfer occurs when a molecule, often water or an acid, transfers a proton to another molecule or to an electrode surface, which stimulates the proton acceptor to also take up an electron. This kind of reaction has been harnessed for many energy applications.

“These proton-coupled electron transfer reactions are ubiquitous. They are often key steps in catalytic mechanisms, and are particularly important for energy conversion processes such as hydrogen generation or fuel cell catalysis,” Surendranath says.

In a hydrogen-generating electrolyzer, this approach is used to remove protons from water and add electrons to the protons to form hydrogen gas. In a fuel cell, electricity is generated when protons and electrons are removed from hydrogen gas and added to oxygen to form water.

Proton-coupled electron transfer is common in many other types of chemical reactions, for example, carbon dioxide reduction (the conversion of carbon dioxide into chemical fuels by adding electrons and protons). Scientists have learned a great deal about how these reactions occur when the proton acceptors are molecules, because they can precisely control the structure of each molecule and observe how electrons and protons pass between them. However, when proton-coupled electron transfer occurs at the surface of an electrode, the process is much more difficult to study because electrode surfaces are usually very heterogenous, with many different sites that a proton could potentially bind to.

To overcome that obstacle, the MIT team developed a way to design electrode surfaces that gives them much more precise control over the composition of the electrode surface. Their electrodes consist of sheets of graphene with organic, ring-containing compounds attached to the surface. At the end of each of these organic molecules is a negatively charged oxygen ion that can accept protons from the surrounding solution, which causes an electron to flow from the circuit into the graphitic surface.

“We can create an electrode that doesn’t consist of a wide diversity of sites but is a uniform array of a single type of very well-defined sites that can each bind a proton with the same affinity,” Surendranath says. “Since we have these very well-defined sites, what this allowed us to do was really unravel the kinetics of these processes.”

Using this system, the researchers were able to measure the flow of electrical current to the electrodes, which allowed them to calculate the rate of proton transfer to the oxygen ion at the surface at equilibrium — the state when the rates of proton donation to the surface and proton transfer back to solution from the surface are equal. They found that the pH of the surrounding solution has a significant effect on this rate: The highest rates occurred at the extreme ends of the pH scale — pH 0, the most acidic, and pH 14, the most basic.

To explain these results, researchers developed a model based on two possible reactions that can occur at the electrode. In the first, hydronium ions (H3O+), which are in high concentration in strongly acidic solutions, deliver protons to the surface oxygen ions, generating water. In the second, water delivers protons to the surface oxygen ions, generating hydroxide ions (OH-), which are in high concentration in strongly basic solutions.

However, the rate at pH 0 is about four times faster than the rate at pH 14, in part because hydronium gives up protons at a faster rate than water.

A reaction to reconsider

The researchers also discovered, to their surprise, that the two reactions have equal rates not at neutral pH 7, where hydronium and hydroxide concentrations are equal, but at pH 10, where the concentration of hydroxide ions is 1 million times that of hydronium. The model suggests this is because the forward reaction involving proton donation from hydronium or water contributes more to the overall rate than the backward reaction involving proton removal by water or hydroxide.

Existing models of how these reactions occur at electrode surfaces assume that the forward and backward reactions contribute equally to the overall rate, so the new findings suggest that those models may need to be reconsidered, the researchers say.

“That’s the default assumption, that the forward and reverse reactions contribute equally to the reaction rate,” Surendranath says. “Our finding is really eye-opening because it means that the assumption that people are using to analyze everything from fuel cell catalysis to hydrogen evolution may be something we need to revisit.”

The researchers are now using their experimental setup to study how adding different types of ions to the electrolyte solution surrounding the electrode may speed up or slow down the rate of proton-coupled electron flow.

“With our system, we know that our sites are constant and not affecting each other, so we can read out what the change in the solution is doing to the reaction at the surface,” Lewis says.

The research was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Basic Energy Sciences.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 16 January 2024; doi:10.1038/s41558-023-01906-y

Recent US climate bills mark a major step in domestic climate actions, while their successful implementation relies on strong assumptions. This Perspective discusses potential challenges regarding supply, consumer demand and political polarization and how insights of social science could help to overcome these challenges.

New research demonstrates voice cloning, in multiple languages, using samples ranging from one to twelve seconds.

Research paper.

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

• I’m speaking at the International PolCampaigns Expo (IPE24) in Cape Town, South Africa, January 25-26, 2024.

The list is maintained on this page.

Interesting article, with photographs.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Read my blog posting guidelines here.

Many issues facing older adults intersect with other social inequalities, but experts often fail to keep the experiences of historically underserved communities in mind when discussing aging.

Since 2020, the MIT AgeLab’s Aging and Equity Speaker Series has sought to bring together researchers, advocates, and practitioners who aim to understand how aging-related issues affect a broad array of communities.

“We think it’s important to offer a platform at MIT that amplifies the work of researchers who are thinking about issues like intersectionality and identity across the lifespan as people age,” says series co-coordinator Taylor Patskanick, who is a researcher at the AgeLab. “We’re highlighting people who have dedicated their careers to doing work with vulnerable older adults.”

Since the series began in 2020, speakers have hosted conversations on topics like diversity in financial planning, climate and sustainability, and equitable design of new technologies. Others have presented work on the social determinants of health for aging Latin Americans and measuring livability with different communities.

The Aging and Equity series typically holds events each quarter. Speakers have come from national universities, nonprofits such as AARP, and organizations like the architecture firm DiMella Shaffer. Patskanick says one aim in recruiting speakers is to highlight researchers and practitioners who are early in their careers.

Attendees are often members of the MIT community, including students, faculty, and alumni. Some sessions have attracted hundreds of registrants, including many from outside MIT.

Early last year, an event on climate change and health featuring Latrica Best, an associate professor at Boston College, attracted MIT researchers and students as well as older adults concerned about their grandchildren’s future. Older attendees said the talk encouraged them to explore how they might engage in climate activism locally.

Another event featured Philippe Saad, co-founder of LGBTQ Senior Housing Inc. and principal at DiMella Shaffer, who walked through his organization’s creation of the first LGBTQ-friendly housing development in Boston for older adults, known as The Pryde.

The series has helped the AgeLab consider new issues to explore in their research. For instance, Patskanick says sessions have promoted conversations among AgeLab researchers about representation in their studies and how they sample different identities and populations of older adults.

“The series has enabled us to think about how equity comes up in our projects,” Patskanick says. “We’ve done some work on older adults and vaccination, for instance, and after an aging and equity session we hosted, we ended up adjusting how we collected data on various subgroups of older adults that would be robust enough to allow us to look across and within different cultural identities to understand their intersection with how people make decisions about vaccinations.”

The series has also given AgeLab researchers new ideas for inquiry.

“The series has helped inform research questions for us about how people across a greater variety of backgrounds plan for retirement and make financial decisions,” says Sophia Ashebir, who manages the series with Patskanick. “We’ve taken a more nuanced approach in terms of how we think about and measure income, for example.”

With every event, the speaker series contributes to a more inclusive understanding of the issues surrounding older adults, which harkens back to the founding mission of the AgeLab.

“The mission of the AgeLab, put roughly, is to make older people’s lives better,’” Ashebir says. “With this speaker series, we’re trying to amplify the voices of marginalized groups and draw light to new research and initiatives within the field of aging. I think those goals go hand in hand.”

New law journal article:

Smart Device Manufacturer Liability and Redress for Third-Party Cyberattack Victims

Abstract: Smart devices are used to facilitate cyberattacks against both their users and third parties. While users are generally able to seek redress following a cyberattack via data protection legislation, there is no equivalent pathway available to third-party victims who suffer harm at the hands of a cyberattacker. Given how these cyberattacks are usually conducted by exploiting a publicly known and yet un-remediated bug in the smart device’s code, this lacuna is unreasonable. This paper scrutinises recent judgments from both the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom and the Supreme Court of the Republic of Ireland to ascertain whether these rulings pave the way for third-party victims to pursue negligence claims against the manufacturers of smart devices. From this analysis, a narrow pathway, which outlines how given a limited set of circumstances, a duty of care can be established between the third-party victim and the manufacturer of the smart device is proposed...

Despite ambitious approaches, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has weakened some policies adopted by his predecessors.

“The time for talk is over, we are investing right now in Australia’s green energy transition,” Forrest said as he launched construction of the Uungula wind farm.

The plan is likely to disappoint both industry and climate experts studying how the nation will plug its power gap in the future.

The surge in exports may propel China past Japan as the world's No. 1 exporter of cars.

The governor's proposal would still cut nearly $3 billion in climate spending, amid a projected $38 billion budget deficit.

The rental car giant said it was returning to gasoline-powered cars because of lower EV demand.

The Alliance for Automotive Innovation documented five major trends with electric vehicles.

Failing to assess legal risks could lead investors and regulators to back the wrong projects, according to research by the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme.