March 25, 2010, at the 239th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, Tongxiang Fan, and his colleagues, Di zhang, and Han Zhou from State Key Lab of Matrix Composites at Shanghai Jiaotong University, reported a novel design to increase the efficiency of utilizing solar energy to catalyze water into hydrogen fuel. Inspired from the structure of leaves, Fan's group have made Artificial Inorganic Leaf (AIL) with TiO2 increasing the efficiency more than 30 times that of conventional TiO2 catalysis.
Reflections on the 2010 AAAS Conference
As the winner of the 2010 JYI Research Department Award, I was given the amazing opportunity to attend the AAAS Conference in San Diego, Feb. 18-22, 2010. The theme of this year's conference was "Bridging Science and Society," a theme that goes particularly well with the interests of this journal. We too look at the question: how can we translate scientific research so that people in society can understand and use it?
Skewing the Perceptron: Modeling the Importance of System-Level Manipulation When Investigating Long-Term Potentiation
Manipulation of learning processes in the brain has proven to be experimentally challenging. Various studies have focused on specific components of Long-Term Potentiation (LTP), attempting to systematically regulate the learning progress through manipulation of its proposed elements. The manipulation of such elements is thought to result in a proportional change in the efficacy of the whole system. Based on the inadequate results of this approach, we hypothesized that changes implemented to a fraction of synapses in a network represented an incomplete investigation of LTP function.