3/17/2023 0 Comments Scientists finetune odds hitting![]() An important function of the brain is to try to predict the future. The brains of our ancestors had to help them learn from their mistakes, so that the human race could survive. Making a mistake could have meant injury or death for our distant ancestors who lived in the wild, hunting game and avoiding predators. These feelings can be annoying or painful, but they are part of what your brain does to make you succeed in the future. That sudden annoying jolt you feel when the dart misses the dartboard or the sinking feeling you get when you get an F on a test. Where in the brain does this ERN come from? How does it help us learn? And how does it change as we develop from children to adults? Making Mistakes It is as if the brain already knows we are making a mistake within fractions of a second, before we are even aware of it. This activity, called the error-related negativity or ERN, happens almost at the same time that the error is made. One thing researchers have found using this method is that the brain creates a specific kind of brain activity when a person makes a mistake. To study how the brain detects and deals with errors, researchers have used caps equipped with sensors that can measure brain activity. ![]() This could make the production of these chemicals much more sustainable.We all make mistakes-and when we do, it is a great opportunity for the brain to adjust what it is doing and to learn. "Syngas is currently being converted into methanol, diesel fuel, and other useful chemicals all over the world. "If these electrocatalysts could be scaled up to work in industrial reactors, we could make syngas using renewably generated electricity and CO2," said Ross. When the gold is left unadulterated, the hydrogen-to- carbon monoxide mix is 1-to-10, demonstrating wide flexibility in syngas output. For example, a 1-atom-thick layer of copper covering the gold surface can produce a 2-to-1 mixture of hydrogen to carbon monoxide. The researchers used X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy techniques at Berkeley Lab's Molecular Foundry to quantify the amount of copper on the gold electrocatalyst needed to create different syngas mixtures. To produce a mixture that is more hydrogen-rich, we add more copper." "A nanostructured surface that is primarily gold yields mostly carbon monoxide. "The copper changes the strength with which CO2 binds with the surface," said study lead author Michael Ross, a postdoctoral researcher in Yang's lab. The researchers found that they could control the amount of carbon monoxide and hydrogen generated by the electrocatalyst by adjusting the amount of copper atoms layered onto a nanostructured gold surface. Shown is a scanning electron microscope image of nanostructured syngas catalysts. "Many processes that utilize syngas require different compositions of gas, so we wanted to create a family of electrocatalysts that can be easily tunable." "We know of no other single electrocatalyst that combines high production rates with such wide-ranging syngas composition control," said Yang, who is also a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. The study was led by Peidong Yang, senior faculty scientist at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) Materials Sciences Division, and Edward Sargent, professor at the University of Toronto's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. They describe their design in a paper recently published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Designing a material and a process that can easily control the composition of syngas would be an important improvement in reducing the environmental impacts of those industrial processes. The researchers say syngas can be converted downstream into small molecules, like ethanol, or larger hydrocarbons, such as those in gasoline, by fermentation or thermochemistry.
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