MTorrice writes “Lithium-sulfur batteries promise to store four to five times as much energy as today’s best lithium-ion batteries. But their short lifetimes have stood in the way of their commercialization. Now researchers demonstrate that a sulfur-based polymer could be the solution for lightweight, inexpensive batteries that store large amounts of energy. Battery electrodes made from the material have one of the highest energy-storage capacities ever reported” Litihium Ion batteries should maintain capacity for about 1000 cycles, whereas Lithium-sulfur batteries traditionally went kaput after about 100. But it looks like they are getting pretty close to something feasible, from the article: “The best performing copolymer consisted of 90% sulfur by mass. Batteries using this copolymer had an initial storage capacity of 1, 225 mAh per gram of material. After 100 charge-discharge cycles, the capacity dropped to 1, 005 mAh/g, and after 500 cycles it fell to about 635 mAh/g. In comparison, a lithium-ion battery typically starts out with a storage capacity of 200 mAh/g but maintains it for the life of the battery, Pyun says.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read this article:
Sulfur Polymers Could Enable Long-Lasting, High-Capacity Batteries
In a time when business cards seem more obsolete than ever , more and more people are coming up with fantastic ways to modernize them. And no one will probably make a better first impression than Kevin Bateske, who created this business-card-sized Game Boy clone called the Arduboy that’s just 1.6 millimeters thick. Read more… 
Biologists have discovered a rare mutation that kills off the gene responsible for Type 2 diabetes . The mutation, which reduces risk by up to two-thirds (even in obese people), destroys a gene used by pancreas cells where insulin is made . It’s a promising discovery that could result a drug that mimics the mutation’s effect. Read more… 
To clarify, the @HSCIC story that’s coming is, I believe, infinitely worse than patient hospital records being uploaded to Google BigQuery — ben goldacre (@bengoldacre) March 3, 2014 PA Consulting, a management consulting firm, obtained the entire English and Welsh hospital episode statistics database and uploaded it to Google’s Bigquery service . The stats filled 27 DVDs and took “a couple of weeks” to transfer to Google’s service, which is hosted in non-EU data centres. This is spectacularly illegal. The NHS dataset includes each patient’s NHS number, post code, address, date of birth and gender, as well as all their inpatient, outpatient and emergency hospital records. Google’s Bigquery service allows for full data-set sharing with one click. The news of the breach comes after the collapse of a scheme under which the NHS would sell patient records to pharma companies, insurers and others (there was no easy way to opt out of the scheme, until members of the public created the independent Fax Your GP service ). According to researcher and epidemiologist Ben Goldacre, this story is just the beginning: there’s an “infinitely worse” story that is coming shortly. Sarah Wollaston, who is also a family doctor and Conservative backbencher, tweeted: “So HES [hospital episode statistics] data uploaded to ‘google’s immense army of servers’, who consented to that?” The patient information had been obtained by PA Consulting, which claimed to have secured the “entire start-to-finish HES dataset across all three areas of collection – inpatient, outpatient and A&E”. The data set was so large it took up 27 DVDs and took a couple of weeks to upload. The management consultants said: “Within two weeks of starting to use the Google tools we were able to produce interactive maps directly from HES queries in seconds.” The revelations alarmed campaigners and privacy experts, who queried how Google maps could have been used unless some location data had been provided in the patient information files. NHS England patient data ‘uploaded to Google servers’, Tory MP says [Randeep Ramesh/The Guardian] ( via Charlie Stross ) 
