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The drive to replace polluting petrol and diesel cars with a new breed of electric vehicles has gathered momentum in recent weeks. But there is an unanswered environmental question at the heart of the electric car movement: what on earth to do with their half-tonne lithium-ion batteries when they wear out?

British and French governments last month committed to outlaw the sale of petrol- and diesel-powered cars by 2040, and carmaker Volvo pledged to only sell electric or hybrid vehicles from 2019.

The number of electric cars in the world passed the 2m mark last year and the International Energy Agency estimates there will be 140m electric cars globally by 2030 if countries meet Paris climate agreement targets. This electric vehicle boom could leave 11m tonnes of spent lithium-ion batteries in need of recycling between now and 2030, according to Ajay Kochhar, CEO of Canadian battery recycling startup Li-Cycle.

Recycling gap

However, in the EU as few as 5% (pdf) of lithium-ion batteries are recycled. This has an environmental cost. Not only do the batteries carry a risk of giving off toxic gases if damaged, but core ingredients such as lithium and cobalt are finite and extraction can lead to water pollution and depletion among other environmental consequences.

There are, however, grounds for optimism. Thus far, the poor rates of lithium-ion battery recycling can be explained by the fact that most are contained within consumer electronics, which commonly end up neglected in a drawer or chucked into landfill.

This won't happen with electric vehicles, predicts Marc Grynberg, chief executive of Belgian battery and recycling giant Umicore. "Car producers will be accountable for the collection and recycling of spent lithium-ion batteries," he says. "Given their sheer size, batteries cannot be stored at home and landfilling is not an option."

EU Regulations, which require the makers of batteries to finance the costs of collecting, treating and recycling all collected batteries, are already encouraging tie-ups between carmakers and recyclers.

Umicore, which has invested €25m (£22.6m) into an industrial pilot plant in Antwerp to recycle lithium-ion batteries, has deals in Europe with both Tesla and Toyota to use smelting to recover precious metals such as cobalt and nickel. Grynberg says: "We have proven capabilities to recycle spent batteries from electric vehicles and are prepared to scale them up when needed."

Problem solved? Not exactly. While commercial smelting processes such as Umicore's can easily recover many metals, they can't directly recover the vital lithium, which ends up in a mixed byproduct. Umicore says it can reclaim lithium from the byproduct, but each extra process adds cost.

This means that while electric vehicle batteries might be taken to recycling facilities, there's no guarantee the lithium itself will be recovered if it doesn't pay to do so.

Investment bank Morgan Stanley in June said it forecast no recycling of lithium at all over the decade ahead, and that there risked being insufficient recycling infrastructure in place when the current wave of batteries die. "There still needs to be more development to get to closed loop recycling where all materials are reclaimed," says Jessica Alsford, head of the bank's global sustainable research team. "There's a difference between being able to do something and it making economic sense."

Second life for batteries

Francisco Carranza, energy services MD at Nissan, says the fundamental problem is that while the cost of fully recycling a battery is falling toward €1 per kilo, the value of the raw materials that can be reclaimed is only a third of that.

Nissan has partnered with power management firm Eaton for its car batteries to be re-used for home energy storage, rather than be recycled, and this economic problem is a big reason why. "Cost of recycling is the barrier," says Carranza. "It has to be lower than the value of the recovered materials for this to work."

The lack of recycling capacity is "a tragedy", says Amrit Chandan, a chemical engineer leading business development at Aceleron, a hi-tech British startup looking to transform end of life batteries. "It takes so much energy to extract these materials from the ground. If we don't re-use them we could be making our environmental problems worse," he says.

Aceleron, like Nissan, thinks the answer lies in re-using rather than recycling car batteries - for which the company has patented a process. Chandan says car batteries can still have up to 70% of their capacity when they stop being good enough to power electric vehicles, making them perfect - when broken down, tested and re-packaged - for functions such as home energy storage.

Fresh from recognition by Forbes as one of the 30 most exciting hi-tech startups in Europe, Aceleron is looking for investors to help it roll out pilot projects. "There's going to be a storm of electric vehicle batteries that will reach the end of their life in a few years, and we're positioning ourselves to be ready for it," says Chandan.

This is not the only alternative. Li-Cycle is pioneering a new recycling technology using a chemical process to retrieve all of the important metals from batteries. Kochhar says he is looking to build a pilot plant to put 5,000 tonnes of batteries a year through this this "wet chemistry" process. However, it is early days for the commercial exploitation of this technology.

Linda Gaines, transportation system analyst and electric vehicle battery expert at the Argonne National Laboratory in the US says: "The bottom line is there's time to build plants". "But", she adds, "we don't know what kinds of batteries they'll be yet. It would help if the batteries were standardised and designed for recycling, but they're not."

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The rise of electric cars could leave us with a big battery waste problem

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The drive to replace polluting petrol and diesel cars with a new breed of electric vehicles has gathered momentum in recent weeks. But there is an unanswered environmental question at the heart of the electric car movement: what on earth to do with their half-tonne lithium-ion batteries when they wear out?

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Amplify Possibilities To Plan For A Better Future

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Amplify Possibilities To Plan For A Better Future

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Military and climate experts, including a former chief of the defence force, have warned that Australia faces potential "disastrous consequences" from climate change, including "revolving" natural disasters and the forced migration of tens of millions of people across the region, overwhelming security forces and government.

Former defence force chief Adm Chris Barrie, now adjunct professor at the strategic and defence studies centre at the Australian National University, said in a submission to a Senate inquiry that Australia's ability to mitigate and respond to the impacts of climate change had been corrupted by political timidity: "Australia's climate change credentials have suffered from a serious lack of political leadership".

The inquiry into the security ramifications of climate change also heard from some of the country's leading climate scientists, who warned the security threats posed by climate change had been underestimated, and complained Australia had been "walking away" from exactly the type of research that would help the country prepare.

Other experts, however, counselled against "alarmist" predictions and said the focus of climate change response should be on those people most acutely affected by it, rather than the security concerns of developed countries most able to respond.

Barrie said the security threat of climate change was comparable to that posed by nuclear war, and said the Australian continent would be most affected by changing climate.

"We will suffer great effects from these changes, such as new weather patterns; droughts, sea-level rises and storm surges, because we have substantial urban infrastructure built on the coastal fringe; ravages of more intense and more frequent heatwaves and tropical revolving storms."

But he said the existential impacts of climate change were likely to be first, and most severely, felt across Australia's region, the Asia-Pacific rim, the most populous region in the world, and one that will be home to seven billion people by 2050.

Barrie posited a scenario in which the glaciers in the Tibetan Plateau and Himalayan-Hindu Kush ranges - which reliably deliver fresh water into China, the Mekong Delta, Myanmar, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan - would disappear.

"A serious shortage of fresh water brings famine; starving people are a very serious security problem. The question then becomes 'what will happen if starving people on the rim of Asia are looking for a new home?'

"Historical evidence suggests that under such circumstances mass migration of these people will occur. It follows that several tens of millions of people might seek better fortunes in Australia and possibly New Zealand.

"Most other options for settlement in our region would already have high population densities. Our security forces, and all arms of government, would be overwhelmed in such a scenario."

The Australian Defence Force has been examining the potential insecurities caused by climate change for a decade. Within Defence, there are serious concerns over the vulnerability of military bases to climate impacts, and the military's reliance on fossil fuels.

But Barrie said political action lagged far behind and Australia's hyper-politicised debate over climate had hampered decisive government action.

"Our current posture is a manifest failure of leadership," he said.

Scientists at the ARC Centre for Climate Extremes, led by Andy Pitman from the University of New South Wales, said in their submission that climate scientists could help the country prepare for these sorts of threats but that investments in the required work was not occurring.

They noted many assessments of the threats to national security posed by climate change may be an underestimation, and called for a "high-level taskforce to examine risks associated with climate change and national security".

"Most assessments linking climate change with climate risk have assumed changes are well described by the average," they said, arguing this needed to be "urgently modified".

They said that focusing on average temperature rise masks more serious changes that will occur in relation to extreme events and "compound events".

"We do not know where or when extreme events will hit, which regions will become less vulnerable and which regions will suddenly emerge to be vulnerable," they say.

They said those problems could be solved, but that Australia was not devoting enough research to the issue.

They also noted that while infrastructure and systems are often built to be resilient against isolated events - such as sea-level rise or a storm - that design often assumes they will happen in isolation, but if they occur together they could be "catastrophic".

Again, the scientists said Australia was not focussing on the topic and noted that the US was examining compound events including the co-occurrence of droughts and heatwaves.

"Australia lags behind the US and some European countries in examining, assessing and responding to climate-change risks in terms of national security," they said.

"Vulnerabilities associated with national security and climate change are already increasing and exist now. These are not 'future issues' that can be left for a decade before strategies are considered. The creation of a high-level taskforce to examine risks associated with climate change and national security is urgent and overdue."

Jane McAdam, director of UNSW's Kaldor centre for international refugee law told the inquiry climate change functioned as a "threat amplifier", that magnified risk and exacerbated existing crises.

"Disasters become disasters on steroids: more frequent and more intense. Climate change is also a process. Slow-onset impacts such as sea-level rise or desertification take place over time, resulting in a gradual deterioration of living conditions that ultimately renders land uninhabitable."

But she said the prospect of massive, sudden international migration was highly unlikely, and focused on the wrong people.

"Reasoned, empirically-grounded analysis has too often been overshadowed by alarmist and ill-informed assumptions about the numbers of people on the move, and the nature of that movement. As a result, the security analysis has been 'flipped' away from the needs of the most vulnerable communities to instead focus on the national security of developed states, premised on the flawed notion that they will be inundated by people fleeing the impacts of climate change."

McAdam said most displacement and migration would occur within countries, not across national borders.

"Longer-term movement will generally be gradual rather sudden, and movement that is sudden (for instance, in the aftermath of a disaster) will often require temporary relief rather than permanent migration. There is scant evidence to justify claims that there will be mass outflows of people across international borders which will threaten international, regional or national security, or generate new risks of Islamist terrorism or fundamentalism."

McAdam said internal displacement could generate low-level social tensions and potential conflict over key resources such as land, housing, food, water and employment.

The parliamentary inquiry has also heard climate change has already contributed to and worsened conflicts across the world, including in Mali, Yemen, and the Arab Spring and civil war in Syria from 2011.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said the destruction of the natural environment or access to scarce resources was often used as a weapon of war.

"In armed conflict, the natural resources on which people rely are often attacked in contravention of IHL [international humanitarian law] provisions. This can take the form of theft or killing of livestock, theft of land, drainage or poisoning of water resources, destruction of places of trade and livelihood. Removing the basis of communities' resilience and capacity to adapt to changing weather conditions imperils their survival and contributes to displacement and poverty."

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Australia faces potentially disastrous consequences of climate change, inquiry told

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Military and climate experts, including a former chief of the defence force, have warned that Australia faces potential "disastrous consequences" from climate change, including "revolving" natural disasters and the forced migration of tens of millions of people across the region, overwhelming security forces and government.

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An experienced beekeeper is suspected of stealing 40,000 bees from Anglesey in one of Britain's biggest bee rustling cases in years.

Only someone with a bee suit and veil could have pulled off the heist on Paul Williams's hive in Rhydwyn "without getting stung to smithereens", police said.

The miserably rainy summer could have ruined the thief's own honey production and driven them to carry out the theft, one expert has suggested.

Poor weather, combined with the increased popularity of beekeeping, has also pushed up the price of a "nucleus" - a set of wooden frames plus a family of bees and a queen - from £50 to at least £200, according to Diane Roberts of the British Beekeepers Association.

Bees do not like rain, she said. "When it is rainy the bees don't fly every day, or they can only go out for a couple of hours when there is a break between showers.

"All the wet weather will help the flowers produce a lot of nectar, but the bees can't get out. If the bees live somewhere without a lovely big patch of flowers nearby they may fly up to 13km [8 miles] to collect the pollen and nectar, but if it's rainy they won't make it that far in the gaps between showers."

Instead the bees stay in their hive and eat their own honey while they wait for the sun to come out.

Williams keeps bees as a hobby in a ditch in a field in Rhydwyn on Anglesey. He checks on his swarm weekly but found the £400 hive and the 30,000-40,000 bees inside had been taken sometime between 26 July and 2 August.

PC Dewi Evans of the North Wales police said: "It is an unusual crime - there aren't that many people who know how to steal bees.

"We believe whoever was responsible must have been wearing a full bee suit, otherwise they would have been stung to smithereens and very badly injured."

Evans appealed for information from anyone who may have noticed an unusual buzzing sound in their neighbourhood.

Roberts agreed that the thief must be an experienced apiarist. "You need to know what you are doing to steal a hive - which entrances of the hive to block up, and not to use solid tape, otherwise you could suffocate the bees," she said.

She also suggested the thief must have had a getaway car, or at least a trolley. A honey "super", the box that holds the frames where the bees store their honey, weights at least 40lb (18kg) when full, she said. A hive can have up to eight supers.

Roberts suggested that the increased price of a nucleus was turning some beekeepers rogue. "You used to be able to get a 'nuke' for £50. Now it's never less than £200."

The price rise is partly down to her organisation's successful drive to increase beekeeping, she said. The organisation now has 25,000 members, up from just 8,000 in 2010. "As a consequence, the price of a nucleus has increased a lot," she said.

It is not the first bee heist on Anglesey. In the summer of 2015, 45,000 bees were stolen from the same farm near Cemaes Bay in two separate raids.

Another beekeeper was also suspected of stealing 24,000 bees worth about £2,000 from the Hooton Pagnell Hall estate, near Doncaster, in April. A bee smoker was left at the scene, possibly used to calm the bees before they were taken.

Bee rustling is a particular problem in the US, where crime syndicates have been involved in stealing bee colonies worth millions of dollars and trucking them to almond farms and olive groves. Billions of bees are needed to pollinate California's almond and orange crops - more than live in the Golden State.

Earlier this year, about $1m (£770,000) worth of stolen bees were found in a field in Fresno County in what the local sheriff's department described as a "beehive chop shop".

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Rustler steals 40,000 bees in Britain's biggest hive heist in years

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An experienced beekeeper is suspected of stealing 40,000 bees from Anglesey in one of Britain's biggest bee rustling cases in years. Only someone with a bee suit and veil could have pulled off the heist on Paul Williams's hive in Rhydwyn "without getting stung to smithereens", police said.

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Where global warming gets real: inside Nasa's mission to the north pole - podcast

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For 10 years, Nasa has been flying over the ice caps to chart their retreat. This data is an invaluable record of climate change. But does anyone care?

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New high-efficiency low-emission (HELE) coal-fired power plants have a role in the energy mix and the government is prepared to intervene in the market, Josh Frydenberg has said.

The energy and environment minister told Sky News on Sunday that new coal plants "need to be considered" alongside other sources of baseload power, and the government could intervene if the market failed to deliver the "best possible outcomes" in the electricity market.

The comments leave open the possibility of government intervention in favour of coal, despite Frydenberg saying in July that the government would only support new coal power plants "if the market supports that".

Asked about the Finkel's review's recommendation for a clean energy target, Frydenberg said there was no "need to rush this decision", because a CET would not come into force until 2020.

In June the Finkel review called for a CET as a means to lower energy prices and achieve an emissions reduction target of 28% on 2005 levels by 2030 in the electricity sector.

The government has said it is "too early" to say if it will adopt the policy, although Malcolm Turnbull has left open the option of considering an alternative.

On Sunday Frydenberg said the purpose of the CET was "to try to integrate climate and energy policy andto provide a level of investment certainty for generation investments that have a 20, 30, or 40-year lifespan".

He said a CET was "a live issue and a live option for the Coalition", but it would first receive a report back from the Australian Energy Market Operator in a few weeks' time about the amount of dispatchable, baseload power needed in the system.

Asked if coal would play a role in generation, the energy and environment minister replied: "Certainly existing and new coal does have a role to play in our energy mix."

"Low emissions high efficiency [HELE] coal fire power stations ... do have a role to play in the energy mix going forward."

When it was suggested that there was no appetite from investors to build a new HELE coal plant, Frydenberg at first insisted it will be "up to the market" to decide.

"Once we have the level of investment certainty that we all want for our energy system going forward, then the market will be best placed to work out the role of a HELE coal-fired plant, or another form of gas generator or a form of renewables with storage."

"If we can get affordable baseload power with a HELE plant or with renewables and storage then we'll take it."

Frydenberg has been under pressure from repeated public lobbying by senior Nationals to bring more coal into the system.

Asked to reconcile the contradiction of saying the government believed new coal plants had a role but it was up to the market to decide, he replied: "The government stands ready to ensure the best possible outcomes in the marketplace if the market itself can't deliver that."

He said a HELE coal plant "does need to be considered", as well as new gas plants and renewable energy with storage.

Frydenberg noted renewable energy was supported by the renewable energy target, and lamented the fact that no gas power stations had been built since 2010 and no coal stations since 2007.

"If we're going to get more thermal generation, we need to look at all the options available to the government."

Frydenberg said the three causes of higher electricity bills were higher gas prices, investment uncertainty and closure of coal power plants.

He trumpeted government efforts to pressure gas companies to keep more supply for domestic use, saying they had already started to flow through to the spot price, which has fallen from its highs at the start of the year.

Asked if the government could make changes to the proposed CET, Frydenberg said it was "too early to say ... other than to say that we do need a mechanism to integrate energy and climate policy".

Frydenberg said he was focused on "outcomes", and noted that the Finkel plan would both reduce the trajectory of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions but also reduce prices overall.

He said the government was "unequivocal" that affordability is its number one concern and it is pursuing a "technology neutral" approach.

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New coal plants have a role in Australia's energy future, Josh Frydenberg says

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New high-efficiency low-emission (HELE) coal-fired power plants have a role in the energy mix and the government is prepared to intervene in the market, Josh Frydenberg has said. The energy and environment minister told Sky News on Sunday that new coal plants "need to be considered" alongside other sources of baseload power, and the government could intervene if the market failed to deliver the "best possible outcomes" in the electricity market.

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Arctic sea ice is not merely a passive responder to the climate changes occurring around the world, according to new research.

Scientists at Yale University and the University of Southampton say the ongoing Arctic ice loss can play an active role in altering one of the planet's largest water circulation systems: the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).

AMOC has a lower limb of dense, cold water that flows south from the north Atlantic, and an upper limb of warm, salty water that flows north from the south Atlantic as part of the Gulf Stream. AMOC plays a major role in regional and global climate, affecting the Atlantic rim countries -- particularly those in Europe -- and far beyond. It was featured in the movie "The Day After Tomorrow."

"Conventional thinking has been that if ocean circulation weakens, reducing the transport of heat from low to high latitudes, then it should lead to sea ice growth. But we have found another, overlooked, mechanism by which sea ice actively affects AMOC on multi-decadal time scales," said professor Alexey Fedorov, climate scientist at the Yale Department of Geology and Geophysics and co-author of a study detailing the findings in the journal Nature Climate Change.

The first author of the paper is Florian Sévellec, a former Yale postdoctoral researcher in Fedorov's lab who is now an associate professor at the University of Southampton. Wei Liu, a Yale postdoctoral associate, is another co-author of the study.

Earlier this year, a different Yale-led study cautioned that the AMOC system was not as stable as previously thought. That study said the possibility of a collapsed AMOC under global warming conditions is being significantly underestimated.

"We've now found this new connection between sea ice and AMOC," Liu said. "Sea ice loss is clearly important among the mechanisms that could potentially contribute to AMOC collapse."

The researchers based their findings on a combination of comprehensive climate model simulations and novel computations of the sensitivity of ocean circulation to fluctuations in temperature and salinity at the ocean's surface over time.

"In our experiments we saw a potential loss of 30% to 50% of AMOC's strength due to Arctic sea ice loss. That is a significant amount, and it would accelerate the collapse of AMOC if it were to occur," Fedorov said.

In the short-term, changes in the subpolar North Atlantic have the greatest impact on AMOC, the researchers found; but over the course of multiple decades, it was changes in the Arctic that became most important to AMOC, they said.

"We suggest that Arctic changes on a multi-decadal timescale, such as the decline in sea ice cover that we are currently experiencing, is the most efficient way to weaken the large-scale ocean circulation of the North Atlantic, which is responsible for the oceanic transport of heat from the equator to high latitudes," Sévellec said.

Grants from the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Natural and Environmental Research Council UK supported the research.

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global warming; climate; geography; oceanography; ice ages; environmental awareness; snow and avalanches; environmental issues

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Loss of Arctic sea ice impacting Atlantic Ocean water circulation system

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Arctic sea ice is not merely a passive responder to the climate changes occurring around the world, according to new research. Scientists say the ongoing Arctic ice loss can play an active role in altering one of the planet's largest water circulation systems: the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).

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Solar capacity has been growing at a jaw dropping pace in India. What is especially remarkable is the range of stakeholders that play a part in this story. The central government; national level policy makers; national and multilateral agencies; state level governments; central off-takers; state level Discoms; private developers taking equity risk; EPC folks; hardware suppliers; sources of debt finance; corporate customers; individual customers - the list is literally endless.

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The gases in the air around us are unseen but their influence is surprisingly visible. For instance, did you know that, right now, you are probably inhaling the air from Julius Caesar's last gasp in A.D. 44? Or that poison gases inspired Einstein to invent a refrigerator? Or that a man became the toast of turn-of-the-century Paris by controlling his own farts?

These are some of the fascinating details that science writer Sam Kean packs into his new book, Caesar's Last Breath. When National Geographic caught up with Kean at his home in Washington, D.C., he explained why analyzing the gases in the atmospheres of other planets will be the best way of finding intelligent life; how a German physicist created the gas warfare that killed thousands in World War I and continues to do so in Syria today; and why releasing sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere may be the best way of reducing global warming.
The idea that we might still be inhaling the last breath exhaled by Caesar as he lay dying is a cute conceit for a book title. But there's no science to it, is there?
As far as we can tell, it is a legitimate idea. It's sort of an inevitable consequence of a) how many molecules you breathe in every time you take a breath and b) how long those molecules persist in our atmosphere. It's not a guarantee that every single breath you're going to get one. But, on average, it's inevitable that you're going to inhale some of those same molecules over the course of a day.

At standard room temperature and pressure, you're breathing in roughly 25 sextillion molecules every time you take a breath. That's 25 with 21 zeroes behind it. That's a gargantuan number! If you took every human being alive today on the planet-all 7 billion of us-and imagined each one having 7 billion descendants, 7 billion times 7 billion, you'd still be 500 times short of that number. And you inhale that every time you take a breath.

When Caesar exhaled that last breath, all those molecules got spread across the Earth, first in a band of prevailing winds around the same latitude as Italy, then over the northern hemisphere. In the course of about two years, given air currents and circulation, it would probably have spread across the entire world.
You write, "air has shaped far more than our basic biology-it shaped human civilization as well." Give us some highlights.
First, you imagine the idea of steam: being able to use steam or gases, in general, to move things. There were a lot of components to the Industrial Revolution, but the most important thing was being able to get power. And steam was the most common way to power the looms, steam ships, and locomotives that drove the Industrial Revolution.

Explosives were another very important thing. Blowing out train tunnels or other building projects all relied on explosives, which was another way of harnessing the power of gases and being able to use them in a productive way. Similarly, the steel revolution: The idea that Henry Bessemer patented and spread around the world was that you could use air in order to reach into the iron, pull out the carbon molecules, and turn iron into the more flexible and stronger metal we now call steel.
It's the 100th anniversary of Einstein's general theory of relativity. But I suspect that few of our readers know that he also helped invent a refrigerator. How does this fit into the story of the great physicist?
[Laughs] It's an odd footnote to the story of Einstein. At the time, he was going through a divorce and getting re-married, so he had two families to support. He was in dire straits financially and needed some extra income. One day, he read a story about a family that suffocated to death because the refrigerator in their apartment had leaked. The gases they were using as refrigerants at the time were all poisonous. Einstein thought this was terrible and called up a friend, Leo Szilard, and said, "There has to be a better way to do this. Let's try to invent something." So the two of them sat down and designed a new type of refrigerator that used two kinds of non-poisonous liquids mixed together.

Unfortunately, a rival group at General Motors was also working on refrigeration, and to solve the problem of poisonous gases they invented what we now know as Freon. It was a much safer gas and also very good as a refrigerant. Only later we found out Freon is very nasty, in that it can chew up ozone and thus helped contribute to the hole in the ozone layer and climate change. The world would probably have been a lot better off if we'd listened to Einstein and gone with his fridge design. But that's not the way history turned out.
You refer to another German scientist, Fritz Haber, as "one of the most Faustian figures in science history." Tell us about his achievements-and why the recent chlorine gas attack in Syria can be traced back to him.
Haber was one of those dual figures in science in that he did some really great work and also did some really awful work, that still gives us shudders today. He was the person most responsible for inventing the Haber process, which takes nitrogen out of the air and turns it into ammonia, which can then be used in fertilizers, which today help sustain billions of people all over the world.

Unfortunately for his legacy, he was also one of the people instrumental in inventing gas warfare during World War I. There had been gas warfare before him, but he transformed it by using chlorine, among other agents, making it the horrific thing it is today. When we hear about poison gas attacks in Syria, we can trace them directly back to Haber, 100 years ago.

One of the factoids I particularly enjoyed in your book is that "the average adult farts three pints of gas each day, in roughly twenty parcels." Tell us about the science of breaking wind-and the amazing case of Le Petomane.
The idea of tinkering with the atmosphere to prevent drought or hurricanes has been around for a while. Talk about some of the experiments-and whether these techniques might help us slow climate change. Towards the end of the book, you pose the questions, "What other kinds of air exist in the infinitude of space? What airs do alien life-forms breathe?" Answer your own questions, Sam-and explain why the best way of finding out if alien life exists is to study the atmospheres of other planets.
[Laughs] This is one of those things I assumed everyone would be curious about. It's probably the gas we encounter most often each day. One common misconception is that methane is the molecule in your farts that produces the bad smell. But that's not the case. Methane is flammable but odorless. Most of the odor is due to a couple of other molecules, like methanethiol and dimethyl sulfate, which are related to methane but are not the same thing.

Around 1900, the highest paid performer at the Moulin Rouge was Joseph Pujol, who had figured out a way to inhale air into his butt then fart it back out. [Laughs] Not only could he do that, he could also imitate birds, dogs, and other animals, play instruments, and inhale cigarette smoke and blow it back out. Some very highbrow people loved him. Freud supposedly kept a picture of Le Petomane on his wall and would draw upon him when developing his theory on anal fixation. Renoir, Matisse, Sarah Bernhardt, and the composer Maurice Ravel all adored him!

The idea of controlling the weather has gone in and out of fashion throughout the 20th century. In the past, scientists sprinkled silver iodide into clouds in the hope that raindrops would coalesce around the silver iodide molecules and build up to be heavy enough that they would fall out as rain: precipitation on demand. They even thought they could control hurricanes and other big storms with it, by diffusing them before they reached land.
What surprised-and shocked-you most during your research for the book?
Most meteorologists today don't put much stock in that idea. The idea of controlling weather is now regarded as a bit disreputable. But it has survived in a different form and is now being revived to control climate change. The idea is to sprinkle something like sulfur dioxide high up in the atmosphere, which would reflect sunlight back out into space and potentially keep the Earth cooler. It's different from the idea of making rain, but it's still tinkering with the atmosphere to give human beings power over the future of weather and climate.

As most readers probably know, we are starting to discover planets around other stars. Some of them are Earth-like and the big question is, Is there life on those other planets? Short of sending a probe there, which no one in our lifetime will be around to examine when it gets back, the only way we're going to be able to figure this out is to look at their atmospheres.

You're going to look for gases that we assume would be produced by life forms. There was an idea for a while that if we found pure oxygen, O ₂, it would be a surefire sign of life because almost all oxygen nowadays is produced by plants and other living creatures. But finding oxygen wouldn't, by itself, be enough to say there's definitely life on a planet. What you would want to look for is a combination of oxygen and other molecules, because a substantial amount of both oxygen and methane would be a good sign that something is producing them on a regular basis-and life would be the most likely option for producing them.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
You could also jump to the other end of the spectrum and try to investigate whether there is intelligent life on these planets by looking for gases that could not possibly be produced by natural processes, like Freon, chlorofluorocarbons, and other pollutants that advanced civilizations produce as a by-product. Those are the two ends of the spectrum we're looking at.

When we think about gases, we think about nitrogen and oxygen because those make up roughly 99 percent of all molecules we breathe. I was wondering what else I was going to say about the remaining 1 percent. But the more I looked into it, the more I realized that those other gases, which make up only a tiny percentage of the air, have a lot of rich history to them, if you look deeper.

I compare these other gases to the molecules that give wine its complex flavor. Water molecules in the alcohol make up the vast majority of the molecules in wine. But no one would ever say that the water and the alcohol are the only things in wine. You need all those other molecules to give it its complex flavors and finish.

It's the same way with the air. Whether you're talking about anesthesia, refrigerants, fallout from nuclear weapons, or making steel, these are really important. What shocked me most is the fact that we're inhaling all these different gases but we don't think about the role they play not only in human life, but in human civilization, as well.

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The Air You Breathe Is Full of Surprises

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The gases in the air around us are unseen but their influence is surprisingly visible. For instance, did you know that, right now, you are probably inhaling the air from Julius Caesar's last gasp in A.D. 44? Or that poison gases inspired Einstein to invent a refrigerator?

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Scientists have uncovered the largest volcanic region on Earth - two kilometres below the surface of the vast ice sheet that covers west Antarctica.

The project, by Edinburgh University researchers, has revealed almost 100 volcanoes - with the highest as tall as the Eiger, which stands at almost 4,000 metres in Switzerland.

Geologists say this huge region is likely to dwarf that of east Africa's volcanic ridge, currently rated the densest concentration of volcanoes in the world.

volcano artwork

And the activity of this range could have worrying consequences, they have warned. "If one of these volcanoes were to erupt it could further destabilise west Antarctica's ice sheets," said glacier expert Robert Bingham, one of the paper's authors. "Anything that causes the melting of ice - which an eruption certainly would - is likely to speed up the flow of ice into the sea.

"The big question is: how active are these volcanoes? That is something we need to determine as quickly as possible."

The Edinburgh volcano survey, reported in the Geological Society's special publications series, involved studying the underside of the west Antarctica ice sheet for hidden peaks of basalt rock similar to those produced by the region's other volcanoes. Their tips actually lie above the ice and have been spotted by polar explorers over the past century.

But how many lie below the ice? This question was originally asked by the team's youngest member, Max Van Wyk de Vries, an undergraduate at the university's school of geosciences and a self-confessed volcano fanatic. He set up the project with the help of Bingham. Their study involved analysing measurements made by previous surveys, which involved the use of ice-penetrating radar, carried either by planes or land vehicles, to survey strips of the west Antarctic ice.

The results were then compared with satellite and database records and geological information from other aerial surveys. "Essentially, we were looking for evidence of volcanic cones sticking up into the ice," Bingham said.

After the team had collated the results, it reported a staggering 91 previously unknown volcanoes, adding to the 47 others that had been discovered over the previous century of exploring the region.

These newly discovered volcanoes range in height from 100 to 3,850 metres. All are covered in ice, which sometimes lies in layers that are more than 4km thick in the region. These active peaks are concentrated in a region known as the west Antarctic rift system, which stretches 3,500km from Antarctica's Ross ice shelf to the Antarctic peninsula.

"We were amazed," Bingham said. "We had not expected to find anything like that number. We have almost trebled the number of volcanoes known to exist in west Antarctica. We also suspect there are even more on the bed of the sea that lies under the Ross ice shelf, so that I think it is very likely this region will turn out to be the densest region of volcanoes in the world, greater even than east Africa, where mounts Nyiragongo, Kilimanjaro, Longonot and all the other active volcanoes are concentrated."

The discovery is particularly important because the activity of these volcanoes could have crucial implications for the rest of the planet. If one erupts, it could further destabilise some of the region's ice sheets, which have already been affected by global warming. Meltwater outflows into the Antarctic ocean could trigger sea level rises. "We just don't know about how active these volcanoes have been in the past," Bingham said.

However, he pointed to one alarming trend: "The most volcanism that is going in the world at present is in regions that have only recently lost their glacier covering - after the end of the last ice age. These places include Iceland and Alaska.

"Theory suggests that this is occurring because, without ice sheets on top of them, there is a release of pressure on the regions' volcanoes and they become more active."

And this could happen in west Antarctica, where significant warming in the region caused by climate change has begun to affect its ice sheets. If they are reduced significantly, this could release pressure on the volcanoes that lie below and lead to eruptions that could further destabilise the ice sheets and enhance sea level rises that are already affecting our oceans.

"It is something we will have to watch closely," Bingham said.
Topics

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Scientists discover 91 volcanoes below Antarctic ice sheet

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Scientists have uncovered the largest volcanic region on Earth - two kilometres below the surface of the vast ice sheet that covers west Antarctica. The project, by Edinburgh University researchers, has revealed almost 100 volcanoes - with the highest as tall as the Eiger, which stands at almost 4,000 metres in Switzerland.

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A study published online in The FASEB Journal, involving mice, suggests that EGCG (epigallocatechin-3-gallate), the most abundant catechin and biologically active component in green tea, could alleviate high-fat and high-fructose (HFFD)-induced insulin resistance and cognitive impairment. Previous research pointed to the potential of EGCG to treat a variety of human diseases, yet until now, EGCG's impact on insulin resistance and cognitive deficits triggered in the brain by a Western diet remained unclear.

"Green tea is the second most consumed beverage in the world after water, and is grown in at least 30 countries," said Xuebo Liu, Ph.D., a researcher at the College of Food Science and Engineering, Northwest A&F University, in Yangling, China. "The ancient habit of drinking green tea may be a more acceptable alternative to medicine when it comes to combatting obesity, insulin resistance, and memory impairment."

Liu and colleagues divided 3-month-old male C57BL/6J mice into three groups based on diet:

1) a control group fed with a standard diet,

2) a group fed with an HFFD diet, and 3) a group fed with an HFFD diet and 2 grams of EGCG per liter of drinking water.

For 16 weeks, researchers monitored the mice and found that those fed with HFFD had a higher final body weight than the control mice, and a significantly higher final body weight than the HFFD+EGCG mice. In performing a Morris water maze test, researchers found that mice in the HFFD group took longer to find the platform compared to mice in the control group. The HFFD+EGCG group had a significantly lower escape latency and escape distance than the HFFD group on each test day. When the hidden platform was removed to perform a probe trial, HFFD-treated mice spent less time in the target quadrant when compared with control mice, with fewer platform crossings. The HFFD+EGCG group exhibited a significant increase in the average time spent in the target quadrant and had greater numbers of platform crossings, showing that EGCG could improve HFFD-induced memory impairment.

"Many reports, anecdotal and to some extent research-based, are now greatly strengthened by this more penetrating study," said Thoru Pederson, Ph.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal.

Journal Reference:

Yashi Mi, Guoyuan Qi, Rong Fan, Qinglian Qiao, Yali Sun, Yuqi Gao, Xuebo Liu. EGCG ameliorates high-fat- and high-fructose-induced cognitive defects by regulating the IRS/AKT and ERK/CREB/BDNF. The FASEB Journal, 2017; fj.201700400RR DOI: 10.1096/fj.201700400RR

Cite This Page:

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diabetes; diet and weight loss; nutrition; dieting and weight control; nutrition research; intelligence; mice; rodents; genetically modified

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Green tea ingredient may ameliorate memory impairment, brain insulin resistance, and obesity: New research identifies potential therapeutic intervention for memory impairment, neuroinflammation, and brain insulin resistance induced by high-fat, high-fructose diet

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A study published online in The FASEB Journal, involving mice, suggests that EGCG (epigallocatechin-3-gallate), the most abundant catechin and biologically active component in green tea, could alleviate high-fat and high-fructose (HFFD)-induced insulin resistance and cognitive impairment.