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Wanting to feel productive, the grad student prints multiple articles with reckless abandon.

Entering the house owned by a friend working in the private sector, the grad student anxiously reassesses many of his life choices.

Which new battery will take electric vehicles across the finish line?

For the past seven years or so, electric vehicles have been on the rise. Tesla is practically a household name, and it’s not uncommon to see EVs from companies like Nissan, Chevy, and BMW on the road now. That wouldn’t have happened without the lithium ion battery. Right now, lithium ion is the most popular battery type for electric vehicles. It can last up to 200 miles on a single charge, and it’s not too expensive to make, which means EVs are also relatively affordable.

But experts say that lithium ion batteries can only take electric cars so far—both on the road and in the marketplace. Before they can beat more popular combustion engine cars, electric vehicles will need a battery makeover, which is why countless engineers and scientists are searching for the next EV battery.

So what’s it going to look like? There are dozens of battery chemistries to play with. But how many of them can even approach the success of lithium ion? Electric vehicle advocate and blogger Chelsea Sexton joins George Crabtree, the director of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research at Argonne National Laboratory, to discuss potential successors to the popular lithium ion battery.

Chemists discover structure of bacterial enzyme that generates useful polymers

MIT chemists have determined the structure of a bacterial enzyme that can produce biodegradable plastics, an advance that could help chemical engineers tweak the enzyme to make it even more industrially useful.

The enzyme generates long polymer chains that can form either hard or soft plastics, depending on the starting materials that go into them. Learning more about the enzyme’s structure could help engineers control the polymers’ composition and size, a possible step toward commercial production of these plastics, which, unlike conventional plastic formed from petroleum products, should be biodegradable.

“I’m hoping that this structure will help people in thinking about a way that we can use this knowledge from nature to do something better for our planet,” says Catherine Drennan, an MIT professor of chemistry and biology and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. “I believe you want to have a good fundamental understanding of enzymes like this before you start engineering them.”

Read more.

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Dutch trains now all powered by wind energy

All Dutch trains have become 100% powered by electricity generated by wind energy, the national railway company NS has said, making it a world’s first.

One windmill running for an hour can power a train for 120 miles, the companies said. Dutch electricity company Eneco won a tender offered by NS two years ago and the two companies signed a 10-year deal setting January 2018 as the date by which all NS trains should run on wind energy. ‘We in fact reached our goal a year earlier than planned,” said NS spokesman Ton Boon, adding that an increase in the number of wind farms across the country and off the coast of the Netherlands had helped NS achieve its aim.

They hope to reduce the energy used per passenger by a further 35% by 2020 compared with 2005.

There is a time when it is necessary to abandon the used clothes, which already have the shape of our body and to forget our paths, which takes us always to the same places. This is the time to cross the river: and if we don’t dare to do it, we will have stayed, forever beneath ourselves

Fernando Pessoa (via paizleyrayz)

“People who never met her except across the footlights did not realize how, in her private life, she had such compassion and interest in everyone. After I returned from Hong Kong I was ill with a virus and she rang me up reproachfully later to say, ‘Why didn’t you let me know? I would have come and sit with you.’ Giving flowers to sick people is easy. Giving that precious commodity time is far more expensive for someone who had such a full life. But she always found time for everyone.” -Godfrey Winn

A rare screentest of Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, just after Vivien had been announced as the official actress portraying Scarlett O’hara. A Selznick employee remembers, “Gable knew this was a woman’s picture and treated her with the utmost respect.”