The battery invented 120 years before its time

[sman]

The battery invented 120 years before its time

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210223-the-battery-invented-120-years-too-soon#:~:text=Future Planet&text=At the turn of the,is coming into its own.&text=Edison claimed the nickel-iron,fast as lead-acid batteries.

At the turn of the 20th Century, Thomas Edison invented a battery with the unusual quirk of producing hydrogen. Now, 120 years later, the battery is coming into its own.

Edison claimed the nickel-iron battery was incredibly resilient, and could be charged twice as fast as lead-acid batteries. He even had a deal in place with Ford Motors to produce this purportedly more efficient electric vehicle.

More than a century later, engineers would discover the nickel-iron battery as something of a diamond in the rough

Nickel-iron batteries are extremely durable, as Edison proved in his early electric car, and some have been known to last upwards of 40 years

Scientists create new class of “Turing patterns” in colonies of E. coli

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/02/scientists-create-new-class-of-turing-patterns-in-colonies-of-e-coli/

Shortly before his death, Alan Turing published a provocative paper outlining his theory for how complex, irregular patterns emerge in nature—his version of how the leopard got its spots. These so-called Turing patterns have been observed in physics and chemistry, and there is growing evidence that they also occur in biological systems. Now a team of Spanish scientists has managed to tweak E. coli in the laboratory so that the colonies exhibit branching Turing patterns, according to a recent paper published in the journal Synthetic Biology.

Scientists have tried to apply this basic concept to many different kinds of systems. For instance, neurons in the brain could serve as activators and inhibitors, depending on whether they amplify or dampen the firing of other nearby neurons—possibly the reason why we see certain patterns when we hallucinate. There is evidence for Turing mechanisms at work in zebra-fish stripes, the spacing between hair follicles in mice, feather buds on a bird's skin, the ridges on a mouse's palate, as well as the digits on a mouse's paw. Certain species of Mediterranean ants will pile the dead bodies of ants into structures that seem to exhibit Turing patterns, and there is evidence of Turing patterns in the movement of Azteca ant colonies on coffee farms in Mexico.

Edited February 26, 2021 by sman