May 5, 2013 ? Thermoelectric materials can be used to turn waste heat into electricity or to provide refrigeration without any liquid coolants, and a research team from the University of Michigan has found a way to nearly double the efficiency of a particular class of them that's made with organic semiconductors.
Organic semiconductors are carbon-rich compounds that are relatively cheap, abundant, lightweight and tough. But they haven't traditionally been considered candidate thermoelectric materials because they have been inefficient in carrying out the essential heat-to-electricity conversion process.
Today's most efficient thermoelectric materials are made of relatively rare inorganic semiconductors such as bismuth, tellurium and selenium that are expensive, brittle and often toxic. Still, they manage to convert heat into electricity more than four times as efficiently as the organic semiconductors created to date.
This greater efficiency is reflected in a metric known by researchers as the thermoelectric "figure of merit." This metric is approximately 1 near room temperature for state-of-the-art inorganic thermoelectric materials, but only 0.25 for organic semiconductors.
U-M researchers improved upon the state-of-the-art in organic semiconductors by nearly 70 percent, achieving a figure-of-merit of 0.42 in a compound known as PEDOT:PSS.
"That's about half as efficient as current inorganic semiconductors," said project leader Kevin Pipe, an associate professor of mechanical engineering as well as electrical engineering and computer science. Pipe is a co-author of a paper on the research published in Nature Materials on May 5, 2013.
PEDOT:PSS is a mixture of two polymers: the conjugated polymer PEDOT and the polyelectrolyte PSS. It has previously been used as a transparent electrode for devices such as organic LEDs and solar cells, as well as an antistatic agent for materials such as photographic films.
One of the ways scientists and engineers increase a material's capacity for conducting electricity is to add impurities to it in a process known as doping. When these added ingredients, called dopants, bond to the host material, they give it an electrical carrier. Each of these additional carriers enhances the material's electrical conductivity.
In PEDOT doped by PSS, however, only small fraction of the PSS molecules actually bond to the host PEDOT; the rest of the PSS molecules do not become ionized and are inactive. The researchers found that these excess PSS molecules dramatically inhibit both the electrical conductivity and thermoelectric performance of the material.
"The trouble is that the inactive PSS molecules push the PEDOT molecules further apart, making it harder for electrons to jump between PEDOT molecules," Pipe said. "While ionized PSS molecules improve electrical conductivity, non-ionized PSS molecules reduce it."
To improve its thermoelectric efficiency, the researchers restructured the material at the nanoscale. Pipe and his team figured out how to use certain solvents to remove some of these non-ionized PSS dopant molecules from the mixture, leading to large increases in both the electrical conductivity and the thermoelectric energy conversion efficiency.
This particular organic thermoelectric material would be effective at temperatures up to about 250 degrees Fahrenheit.
"Eventually this technology could allow us to create a flexible sheet -- think of Saran Wrap -- that can be rolled out or wrapped around a hot object to generate electricity or provide cooling," Pipe said.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
UFC 159 was a bizarre event ? possibly cursed by demons ? but there were still plenty of standout performances by fighters whose bouts ended normally. Who stood out for you? Speak up on Twitter or on Facebook.
No. 1 star -- Jon Jones: As we've said since the fight was made, Chael Sonnen was not the right competition for UFC light heavyweight Jones because he is middleweight coming off of a loss. Jones could have taken Sonnen lightly and still probably won, but he didn't do that. He used the fight as another opportunity to show his dominance, beating Sonnen at his own game by taking him down several times before finishing the fight near the end of the first round.
Would the fight have been stopped if they made it out of the first round, and the referee had noticed Jones' mangled toe? Who cares? It didn't happen, and Jones is still the champ.
No. 2 star -- Pat Healy: The UFC's already stacked lightweight division somehow got even tough with Healy's performance on Saturday night. Along with Jim Miller, he put on a show then finished the fight in the third round. He won both Fight of the Night and Submission of the Night, meaning Healy walked away with an extra $130,000.
No. 3 star -- Sara McMann: As an Olympic silver medal-winning wrestler, McMann is one of the most decorated athletes to join the UFC. This means she had big expectations to perform, and she exceeded them. McMann used wrestling and power to stop Sheila Gaff in the first round.
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MADRID (AP) ? With over 6 million unemployed for the first time ever, Spain's jobless rate shot up to a record 27.2 percent in the first quarter of 2013, the National Statistics Institute said Thursday, in another grim picture of the recession-wracked country.
The agency said the number of people unemployed rose by 237,400 people in the first three months of the year, a 1.1 percent increase from the previous quarter. The total out of work stood at 6.2 million people, the first time the number has breached the 6-million mark.
Unsurprisingly, the details of the report make for grim reading.
The number of people considered long-term unemployed ? out of a job for more than a year ? increased to 3.5 million while the unemployment rate for those aged under 25 was a staggering 57 percent. The government body also said its survey found the number of households without any one working had risen by 72,400 to a 1.91 million.
"The situation is really bad, with all the cuts that there have been, there are families that are going through a bad time because a lot of families have all the members unemployed and they don't have any income," said shop assistant Rodrigo Limpias , 30.
Labor Ministry employment secretary Engracia Hidalgo described the figures as "dramatic" but said the government was working non-stop to try make Spain a job creator once again.
Spain has been in recession for much of the past four years as it struggles to deal with the collapse of its once-booming real estate sector in 2008. In the previous decade its economy was thriving, generating millions of jobs.
In just over a year in office, the conservative government has launched a series of financial and labor reforms and pursued a raft of spending cuts and tax increases that have managed to reduce a swollen deficit. Even so, the country had the highest budget deficit among the 17 European Union countries that use the euro in 2012.
"This is getting worse every day. (The government) has no solution, there are more and more people unemployed and we don't have enough to eat," said Maria Carmen Huerta, 55, an unemployed IT worker.
The government's handling of the crisis has sparked almost daily protests.
On Thursday, 1,400 police were to be deployed around Parliament and the building was totally cordoned off ahead of an evening demonstration. Parliament cancelled its session for the day but blamed reasons other than the rally.
Several previous rallies close to Parliament have ended in clashes with police. The Interior Ministry said police arrested four people and confiscated material they believe was to be used to start fires at bank offices in the city. The ministry claims violent, anti-establishment groups are behind the rally.
Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has acknowledged that 2013 will be a bad year but insists that it would have been worse without the reforms. The International Monetary Fund indicated last week that Spain's economy will contract by 1.6 percent this year.
The government is predicting that Spain will return to growth, which should help the labor market. Rajoy has promised reforms to be presented Friday that will "make the economy more flexible, more competitive and will turn those predictions around."
Opposition parties said the unemployment figures highlight how Rajoy's austerity policies are damaging the economy.
"6 million people unemployed is 6 million reasons for the government to withdraw the labor reform and change its economic policy," said Oscar Lopez of the leading opposition Socialist party.
But the EU's top economic official, Commissioner Olli Rehn said "Spain should maintain the reform momentum by including comprehensive and concrete policy measures" in its programs.
He said that "despite significant progress in 2012, there are still excessive macroeconomic imbalances" with high domestic and external debt continuing to pose risks for growth and financial stability.
____
Associated Press writer Juergen Baetz in Brussels contributed to this report.
Contact: John Ascenzi ascenzi@email.chop.edu 267-426-6055 Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Teaching tool could improve emergency training worldwide
New, low-tech teaching techniques used by novice instructors may improve training for healthcare providers in performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on children who suffer cardiac arrest. Researchers in a large multicenter study say their findings hold the potential to standardize and upgrade life support training by hundreds of thousands of instructors around the world.
"In the U.S. alone, over 8,000 children a year have a cardiac arrest, but providers may encounter such a catastrophic event only once or twice in their careers," said the study's senior author, Vinay M. Nadkarni, M.D., a critical care and resuscitation science specialist at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "So it's crucial to keep those front-line providers trained and ready to respond. This new approach will assist with that."
The research team carried out the EXPRESS study in 14 research centers in North America, publishing their results online April 22 in JAMA Pediatrics. The EXPRESS (Examining Pediatric Resuscitation Education Using Simulation and Scripted Debriefing) researchers found that trainees in simulation exercises using a child-sized mannequin retained more knowledge if the crisis simulation leaders used scripted debriefings.
"A debriefing is the most important part of a simulation experience, and gives participants an opportunity to reflect on what they did right and what needs improvement," said Adam Cheng, M.D., of Alberta Children's Hospital and the University of Calgary. Cheng, the study's principal investigator, added that, "In a scripted debriefing, the words and sentences are phrased in a very deliberate way that helps learners reflect and think analytically about their performance and about handling emergency situations."
Nadkarni noted that the teaching method, called "advocacy inquiry," is designed to pull out a rationale from students to explain their decisions. "This avoids the common teaching technique of 'guess what I'm thinking.' We've taken a sophisticated interactive teaching method and distilled it into a script that can be readily used by novice instructors."
Many of the instructorsphysicians, nurses, emergency medical technicians and paramedicsare not highly experienced teachers. But they have a broad reach: some 280,000 instructors teach these programs around the world, typically to a group of 10 trainees each. In North America, about half a million health care workers take the Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS) course per year, featuring emergency simulations on lifelike mannequins.
In the current study, the largest ever conducted involved pediatric simulation, 387 participants in 90 teams followed a 12-minute long scenario in which a 12-month-old infant suffers cardiac arrest. After the teams responded to the simulated emergency, half the instructors debriefed their group with an assigned script, and the other led unscripted debriefings. The debriefing session lasts 20 minutes. As assessed in tests and quizzes, participants in the scripted groups had improved medical knowledge and rated their instructors more highly, compared to unscripted groups.
In addition to comparing scripted to nonscripted debriefing, the researchers also compared "high-realism" to "low-realism" simulation. In the high-realism groups, the instructors used SimBaby, a computerized infant mannequin, with all the functions active, such as heart sounds, blood pressure, and breath sounds; in the low-realism groups, most of SimBaby's functions were turned off.
Using the high-realism simulation didn't provide educational advantages over the low-realism simulation. This may have important practical implications, said Nadkarni, because the high-realism simulators cost roughly $30,000 each as opposed to $300 to $400 for the simplest model. "If these results are generalizable, they imply that we can improve resuscitation training with less investment in expensive simulators," he added.
One limitation of the current study, concluded Nadkarni, is that it measured educational outcomes, not clinical outcomes in patients. Further research will determine how well the improvements in education translate into better care and better outcomes for children.
###
The American Heart Association funded this study. Co-authors with Nadkarni from The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia were Aaron Donoghue, M.D., an emergency medicine physician, and Akira Nishisaki, M.D., a critical care physician.
Cheng et al., "Examining Pediatric Resuscitation Education Using Simulation and Scripted Debriefing," JAMA Pediatrics, published online April 22, 2013.
doi: 10.1001/jamapediatrics.2013.1389
About The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia: The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia was founded in 1855 as the nation's first pediatric hospital. Through its long-standing commitment to providing exceptional patient care, training new generations of pediatric healthcare professionals and pioneering major research initiatives, Children's Hospital has fostered many discoveries that have benefited children worldwide. Its pediatric research program is among the largest in the country, ranking third in National Institutes of Health funding. In addition, its unique family-centered care and public service programs have brought the 516-bed hospital recognition as a leading advocate for children and adolescents. For more information, visit http://www.chop.edu.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Contact: John Ascenzi ascenzi@email.chop.edu 267-426-6055 Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Teaching tool could improve emergency training worldwide
New, low-tech teaching techniques used by novice instructors may improve training for healthcare providers in performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on children who suffer cardiac arrest. Researchers in a large multicenter study say their findings hold the potential to standardize and upgrade life support training by hundreds of thousands of instructors around the world.
"In the U.S. alone, over 8,000 children a year have a cardiac arrest, but providers may encounter such a catastrophic event only once or twice in their careers," said the study's senior author, Vinay M. Nadkarni, M.D., a critical care and resuscitation science specialist at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "So it's crucial to keep those front-line providers trained and ready to respond. This new approach will assist with that."
The research team carried out the EXPRESS study in 14 research centers in North America, publishing their results online April 22 in JAMA Pediatrics. The EXPRESS (Examining Pediatric Resuscitation Education Using Simulation and Scripted Debriefing) researchers found that trainees in simulation exercises using a child-sized mannequin retained more knowledge if the crisis simulation leaders used scripted debriefings.
"A debriefing is the most important part of a simulation experience, and gives participants an opportunity to reflect on what they did right and what needs improvement," said Adam Cheng, M.D., of Alberta Children's Hospital and the University of Calgary. Cheng, the study's principal investigator, added that, "In a scripted debriefing, the words and sentences are phrased in a very deliberate way that helps learners reflect and think analytically about their performance and about handling emergency situations."
Nadkarni noted that the teaching method, called "advocacy inquiry," is designed to pull out a rationale from students to explain their decisions. "This avoids the common teaching technique of 'guess what I'm thinking.' We've taken a sophisticated interactive teaching method and distilled it into a script that can be readily used by novice instructors."
Many of the instructorsphysicians, nurses, emergency medical technicians and paramedicsare not highly experienced teachers. But they have a broad reach: some 280,000 instructors teach these programs around the world, typically to a group of 10 trainees each. In North America, about half a million health care workers take the Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS) course per year, featuring emergency simulations on lifelike mannequins.
In the current study, the largest ever conducted involved pediatric simulation, 387 participants in 90 teams followed a 12-minute long scenario in which a 12-month-old infant suffers cardiac arrest. After the teams responded to the simulated emergency, half the instructors debriefed their group with an assigned script, and the other led unscripted debriefings. The debriefing session lasts 20 minutes. As assessed in tests and quizzes, participants in the scripted groups had improved medical knowledge and rated their instructors more highly, compared to unscripted groups.
In addition to comparing scripted to nonscripted debriefing, the researchers also compared "high-realism" to "low-realism" simulation. In the high-realism groups, the instructors used SimBaby, a computerized infant mannequin, with all the functions active, such as heart sounds, blood pressure, and breath sounds; in the low-realism groups, most of SimBaby's functions were turned off.
Using the high-realism simulation didn't provide educational advantages over the low-realism simulation. This may have important practical implications, said Nadkarni, because the high-realism simulators cost roughly $30,000 each as opposed to $300 to $400 for the simplest model. "If these results are generalizable, they imply that we can improve resuscitation training with less investment in expensive simulators," he added.
One limitation of the current study, concluded Nadkarni, is that it measured educational outcomes, not clinical outcomes in patients. Further research will determine how well the improvements in education translate into better care and better outcomes for children.
###
The American Heart Association funded this study. Co-authors with Nadkarni from The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia were Aaron Donoghue, M.D., an emergency medicine physician, and Akira Nishisaki, M.D., a critical care physician.
Cheng et al., "Examining Pediatric Resuscitation Education Using Simulation and Scripted Debriefing," JAMA Pediatrics, published online April 22, 2013.
doi: 10.1001/jamapediatrics.2013.1389
About The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia: The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia was founded in 1855 as the nation's first pediatric hospital. Through its long-standing commitment to providing exceptional patient care, training new generations of pediatric healthcare professionals and pioneering major research initiatives, Children's Hospital has fostered many discoveries that have benefited children worldwide. Its pediatric research program is among the largest in the country, ranking third in National Institutes of Health funding. In addition, its unique family-centered care and public service programs have brought the 516-bed hospital recognition as a leading advocate for children and adolescents. For more information, visit http://www.chop.edu.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
NEW YORK (AP) ? In what they considered a "must-win" game, the New York Knicks couldn't lose. Not the way they defended after halftime.
"We buckled down on the defensive end," Carmelo Anthony said, "and that's what opened the game up for us."
And they've done it two games in a row.
Anthony scored 34 points, Sixth Man of the Year J.R. Smith added 19, and New York took a 2-0 lead over the Boston Celtics with another dominant second half in an 87-71 victory Tuesday night.
Raymond Felton added 16 points for the Knicks, who used a 27-4 run spanning halftime to blow it open and move halfway to their first series victory since the 2000 Eastern Conference semifinals. This is their first 2-0 lead since sweeping Toronto in the first round that year.
"For us, we know what type of team we are," Anthony said. "We know when we really buckle down on the defensive end, it's been hard for teams."
It's been brutally difficult for Boston.
Paul Pierce scored 18 points for the Celtics, who will host Game 3 on Friday in their first home game since the Boston Marathon bombings.
They will have to be much sharper to avoid their first opening-round elimination since 2005, before they became one of the NBA's power teams again.
"We have to figure out the offensive side of the ball and not be so stagnated," Boston's Kevin Garnett said. "Figure out ways to score more often."
Anthony had said the Knicks needed to treat the game as a "must-win," aware of the difficulty of winning in Boston on Friday with the emotional boost the Celtics will get from finally being home.
They showed that mentality after halftime, outscoring Boston 32-11 in the third quarter.
"I think guys know what's at stake. We don't have to talk about it," veteran forward Kenyon Martin said. "Guys know what it's about right now and it's about winning a championship."
Garnett had 12 points and 11 rebounds, but battled foul trouble and spent too much time walking back to the bench with a raucous Madison Square Garden crowd finally experiencing playoff success again hounding him every step of the way.
Plagued by turnovers in Game 1, when they managed eight points in the decisive fourth quarter, the Celtics watched it all fall apart 12 minutes earlier this time. They managed only 23 points after halftime, two fewer than in their 85-78 loss Saturday.
"I thought we attacked them in the first half, but they hung in there," Celtics coach Doc Rivers said. "They didn't let us throw a knockout punch and I thought in the second half they turned that on us and they threw a knockout punch. Several."
Anthony followed his 36-point opener by making 8 of 13 shots in the second half to finish 11 of 24 for the game.
Iman Shumpert drilled two 3-pointers to open the third and tie it before Pierce scored to give Boston its last lead at 50-48. The Knicks scored 18 of the next 20 points, with the Celtics getting just two free throws from Jeff Green over the next 5-plus minutes. Anthony's jumper with 4:25 remaining in the third capped the run before Garnett finally gave Boston its second basket of the quarter 10 seconds later
The Celtics missed 10 of their first 11 shots of the third while getting outscored 24-4 to open the period.
"I thought in that third quarter we were as good as we've been all year in terms of ball movement and pushing it and making shots," Knicks coach Mike Woodson said.
The Celtics vowed to get Garnett more involved after he shot 4 of 12 while scoring eight points in the opener. But that plan was quickly wrecked when he picked up two fouls in the first 3 minutes, 20 seconds. The Celtics shook it off and led 20-15 when Jason Terry made a 3-pointer with 1:57 left for his first basket of the series.
But the Knicks scored 11 straight to end the period. Smith, recognized before the game for the award he won Monday, kept the celebration going with five points in the final 6.8 seconds, hitting a 36-footer at the buzzer with Celtics players all over him to make it 26-20.
The Celtics quickly settled down again, ripping off an 11-0 run to take a 31-27 lead on another 3-pointer by Terry. The lead later grew to eight when Pierce made a jumper, then fired a lob pass that traveled about three-quarters of the court to a streaking Green.
They led 48-39, gave up the last three points of the half ? and probably never realized they gave away momentum for good with it.
"We made a good run in the first half, we played our style of basketball," Terry said. "But in the second half, we definitely got away from what gave us success."
Notes: Amare Stoudemire still hopes to return from right knee surgery for the second round if the Knicks advance. He hopes to be running full speed soon so he can see how the knee responds to the additional work. ... NBA TV's analysts have made their postseason awards picks, and former Knicks coach and president Isiah Thomas chose Woodson, his friend and former Indiana University teammate. "That's good, but I mean, again, I'm not in this for Coach of the Year, I'm in to try to see if we can get this team to the championship round to try to win a title," Woodson said. "If that happens, it happens, but I'm not sitting here holding my breath about a Coach of the Year award." Woodson added that he and Thomas are friends and talk all the time.
___
Follow Brian Mahoney on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/Briancmahoney
UFC 159 was a bizarre event ? 
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Public release date: 24-Apr-2013
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