Scientists Create Proton Battery That Could Replace Lithium-Ion

Chethana Janith, Jadetimes Staff

C. Janith is a Jadetimes news reporter covering science and geopolitics.

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Plus: it doesn’t explode!

Image Source: (hopptbattery/thescience/Getty)

• Lithium-ion batteries are the backbone of mobile devices and electric cars, but lithium can be costly and explosive.

• Proton batteries - which rely on more abundant materials - have been touted as a good replacement, and a new anode material could help overcome some of their shortcomings, such as limited voltage range.

• This new material can last 3,500 cycles of recharging, maintain high capacity, and operate in colder weather, but scientists still need to improve manufacturing costs and cathode performance before proton batteries can go mainstream.

Lithium-ion batteries are the top dogs of the battery world. This 50-year-old technology forms the electronic backbone of billions of mobile devices around the world, and is the current frontrunner for powering the world’s electric-vehicle future. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t competition.

When it comes to storing renewable energy, for example, other concepts like iron-air batteries (which use oxidation to store energy) could potentially be better options than the more expensive and explosive lithium. And more options are being explored all the time. For instance, the idea of proton batteries - which use protons split from water which then bond with a carbon electrode - is starting to grow in popularity. This is good news, seeing as proton batteries don’t require rare elements such as lithium. And now, scientists at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney want to make them mainstream.

“There are many benefits to proton batteries,” Sicheng Wu, a Ph.D candidate at UNSW Sydney, said in a press statement. “But the current electrode materials used for proton batteries, some of which are made from organic materials, and others from metals, are heavy,” and still cost quite a lot.

In addition to this cost, the few carbon electrodes that do exist have a limited voltage range, and both of these shortcomings currently make proton batteries unfit to be true lithium-ion replacements. However, UNSW Sydney scientists have developed a new carbon electrode called tetraamino-benzoquinone (TABQ) to fix the problem. The team first started with a small molecule called Tetrachloro-benzoquinone (TCBQ), which doesn’t have a high enough redox potential to be a cathode or a low enough potential to be an anode.

So, Wu’s team replaced the four chloro- groups in the molecule with amino- groups (hence the name change), and found that the resulting lower potential both made TABQ a great anode candidate and improved the material’s ability to store protons. While still paired with a TCBQ cathode, the all-organic battery could sustain 3,500 cycles of fully recharging, maintain high capacity, and perform well in cold conditions - a helpful side effect, as we’ll need battery farms especially in the colder, darker parts of the world, and lithium loses efficiency when it gets too cold.

Oh, and another bonus: they don’t explode.

“The electrolyte in a lithium-ion battery is made of lithium salt, a solvent which is flammable and therefore is a big concern,” Chuan Zhao, a professor at UNSW Sydney, said in a press statement. “In our case, we have both electrodes made of organic molecules, and in between we have the water solution, making our prototype battery lightweight, safe and affordable.”

While TABQ is an outstanding anode, the team admits that the TCBQ used in the cathode - which doesn’t have the highest redox potential, will need to be improved upon next. There’s likely more work ahead if proton batteries have any hope of dethroning lithium as the green revolution’s battery of choice.

“We have designed a very good anode material,” Wu said, “and future work will move to the cathode side. We will continue designing new organic materials that have higher redox potential range to increase the battery output voltage. To enhance the usage of renewable energies, we have to develop some more efficient energy integration technologies and our proton battery design is a promising trial.”

Extinct Volcanoes Could Help Solve Our Rare Earth Metal Shortage

Chethana Janith, Jadetimes Staff

C. Janith is a Jadetimes news reporter covering science and geopolitics.

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Image Source: (Pexels/techno-science/Getty)

• Rare earth metals are becoming more and more in-demand as we move toward a clean energy future, but the distribution of these metals means that their extraction can be incredibly damaging.

• Right now, however, we need these materials. So, we need options for viable mineral deposits that can be mined while keeping the side effects to a minimum.

• A group of scientists has a proposal for exactly that - extinct volcanoes.

‘Rare earth metals’ is a phrase you’re probably going to hear more and more in the coming years. They’re a class of minerals that we use in a lot of important tech, ranging from cell phones to electric car motors. Slowly but surely, we are becoming ever more dependent on these metals.

But as useful as they are, there are serious problems with rare earth metals. They are difficult to mine due to their typically low concentrations (though deposits are fairly widespread), the mining process produces significant amounts of toxic and radioactive waste, and they are - much like oil - able to be leveraged in sociopolitical situations to an uncomfortable degree. To dramatically undersell it, the whole thing is a total mess.

Unfortunately, however, it’s not really a mess we can extract ourselves from right now - especially considering that the alternatives to certain pieces of rare earth metal-powered tech aren’t great, either. While engineers are working to develop technologies that don’t rely on these minerals, that work is not moving fast enough, and we still need rare earth metals if we are going to transition to a desperately necessary green energy future.

So, if we can’t get away from them just yet, we need options. Right now, experts are hard at work searching for sources of rare earth metals that are both economically viable and can be extracted with limited negative consequences. And one team of scientists has an idea of where we should be looking: extinct volcanoes. They recently published a paper on the subject in the journal Geochemical Perspectives Letters.

“There is an enigmatic type of magma that contains unusually large amounts of iron,” Michael Anenburg, one of the authors of this new study, wrote in an article for The Conversation. “It is so rare, no eruptions featuring this type of magma have happened in recorded history. Instead, it is only known from extinct volcanoes that were active many millions of years ago.”

One of those volcanoes, Anenburg writes, is called Kiruna. Located in Sweden, the site - which has long been mined for the iron in its iron-rich magma - was found to be the “largest rare earths resource in Europe” just last year.

So, the scientists started to wonder if there was any association between the iron-rich magma and higher-than-average concentrations of rare earth metals. In order to investigate, they took on an extremely elevated and complex version of potentially the most well-known science experiment ever, they made a model volcano.

Now, this was much more complicated than the average baking soda-and-vinegar volcano you’d see at a kids’ science fair. To simulate their dead volcanoes, the team built a machine called a piston cylinder. Then, they placed synthetic materials “akin to volcanic rocks and magmas into small capsules or ‘bottles’ made of noble metals such as platinum,” pressurized the entire system to match the conditions found about 9.5 miles (15 kilometers) under ground, and cranked the heat up to about 2,000°F (1,100°C), melting everything into synthetic magma.

Upon examining their super-heated sludge, the team found that little pockets of iron-rich magma formed inside the more standard-issue magma. Even more interestingly, the iron-rich magma appeared to act almost as a sponge for rare earth metals, pulling them in and soaking them up before separating from the normal magma due to differences in density.

“Iron-rich magmas absorb the rare earths so efficiently, their rare earth contents are almost 200 times greater than the regular magmas around them,” Anenburg wrote. “This means the discovery at Kiruna wasn’t an accident. It’s something we can expect from most, if not all, iron-rich volcanoes.”

If they’re right, it means we suddenly have a lot of new, accessible targets for rare earth metal mining - ones that could be pretty good options all-around. Many of these dead volcanoes are already being mined for iron, and could theoretically be adapted for rare earth metal mining without the same trouble as starting up a new mine. According to Anenburg, this would give existing mines new value, avoid ripping up land for new ones, and could even lead to the re-processing of mine waste to search for these valuable minerals.

This doesn’t solve all of our problems with rare earth metals. Not even close. We’re still a long way from perfecting the process of acquiring these incredibly useful minerals, and it will take a considerable amount of work and commitment to make this process better for everyone, everything, and everywhere involved. But to get there, we’ll need to take a lot of steps - and as a first step, this discovery certainly has potential.

Russia creates world's first cancer vaccine

Chethana Janith, Jadetimes Staff

C. Janith is a Jadetimes news reporter covering science and geopolitics.

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Russia has developed a cancer vaccine that will actually direct the patient’s immunity precisely to fight malignant cells. The drug is universal for all types of cancer diseases. The new vaccine – EnteroMix – will start to be used on humans in early 2025.

Image Source: (jobaaj/Reuters/Getty)

In February 2024, the Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke at the Future Technologies Forum in Moscow, and took the world by surprise when he announced that the Russian scientists were making progress and were nearing in their research in developing cancer vaccines. The statement was quite surprising, since at that time the world’s attention was fixed at the Russia’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine and the Israel’s onslaught against Palestine.

President Putin argued that “we have come very close to the creation of so-called cancer vaccines and immunomodulatory drugs of a new generation.” At that time no one could foresee that Russia’s aspirations to create such a vaccine was far closer from realisation than the expectations of many observers. However, President Putin did not specify about the type of vaccine and neither the types of cancer it would cure in the future. Russia’s mRNA Cancer Vaccine

On December 15, 2024, Russia took Western pharmaceutical and medicine companies by astonishment by announcing the creation of Russia’s own mRNA or Messenger Ribonucleic Acid vaccine against cancer. Andrey Kaprin, General Director of the Radiology Medical Research Centre of the Russian Ministry of Health made the announcement that the vaccine will be made available free of charge to Russian citizens from the upcoming January 2025.

Russia’s news agencies reported that the vaccine was developed in a collaborated effort among many Russian research centres including the Gamaleya National Research Centre for Epidemiology and Microbiology, the Blokhin Cancer Centre, and the Hertsen Oncological Research Institute.

Previously, in June 2024, the Russian Health Minister Mikhail Murashko told news reporters on the side-lines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) that the first preclinical studies results of the anti-cancer vaccine was due in late 2024. He also argued that the research for developing the vaccine was fully “financed by the state as part of the governmental order.”

Why it is called the first-ever cancer vaccine

Before this latest breakthrough in the history of medical science, there existed few vaccines; however, the previous ones aimed to contain the spread of cancer. Nonetheless, the Russian cancer vaccine “can suppress tumour growth and limit the potential for metastases.” Hence, it would not be ambitious to argue that this is the first-ever cancer vaccine that can fully combat cancer.

Geopolitical Implications

It is quite unfortunate that like other fields in the international relations, the West aspires to maintain its hegemony and monopoly over medical science, and seems unwilling to allow access of such medicines and vaccines to poor countries. For instance, Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine was given to many countries around the globe to prevent Covid-19; however, the Western powers propagated false information and propaganda about Russia’s vaccines.

Similarly, even today, it seems very hard for the West to accept and digest Russia’s mRNA-based cancer vaccines. It is very surprising that Western pharmaceutical companies like Moderna and Merck & Co, are still undergoing tests for making such vaccines and have invested billions of USD so far. Likewise, the United Kingdom singed a contract with Germany’s BioNTech amounting to millions of USD for research and development of cancer vaccines. However, perhaps, the Western pharmaceutical giants have already consumed billions of USD, and are not making serious efforts to develop cancer vaccines.

While keeping in view the West’s attitude towards Russian inventions and innovation, the basic purpose of this article is to combat the potential disinformation and propaganda that might be aimed to taint Russia’s cancer vaccine.

Conclusions

The development of cancer vaccine by Russia is a manifold welcome development. First, it would help cure the cancer patients internationally who pay enormous money for their treatments and still suffer. These patients heavily rely on the Western pharmaceutical and medical companies for drugs and treatment equipment. Second, Russia has demonstrated that the people could look towards Moscow as a reliable partner for leadership as well as technological innovation. Third, President Putin delivered his promise and within months of his announcement, and now Russia has fully developed the cancer vaccine.

The most important announcement that was made by the Russian government is that the vaccine will made available to the Russian people without any charge. It is to be remembered here that cancer is a major cause of death among the Russian people. Some sources indicated that cancer is the second-leading cause of death in Russia with “approximately 192 deaths per 100,000 of the country’s population in 2022.”