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Second of a two-part series on new battery technologies. To read the first part, click here. In the push for a better battery, many in the industry are finding that the biggest challenges aren’t in chemistry and physics, but in regulations and market forces. Currently, the opportunities for a cheaper, more efficient way to store electricity are booming. Market research firm IHS Inc. reported that grid-level energy storage is on track to reach 40 gigawatts in capacity by 2022, a hundredfold increase from 2013 (ClimateWire, Feb....

The moon hasn’t had it easy over the years. Since the dawn of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago, its gray and lifeless surface has been repeatedly pummeled by incoming space rocks, leaving behind a pockmarked landscape strewn with rubble. Beneath this surface, however, hide the moon’s most tantalizing secrets for human explorers, from possible reservoirs of ice for producing potable water and rocket fuel to hollow lava tubes that are suitable for harboring habitats....

Clouds are moving up, up and away. An analysis of satellite data has found that, since the early 1980s, clouds have shifted towards Earth’s poles and cloud tops have extended higher into the atmosphere. The changes match what climate models predict and are a rare step forward among much scientific uncertainty about how clouds will behave in a warming world “It’s really the first credible evidence that we have of climate change and clouds in the observed record,” says Joel Norris, an atmospheric scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California....

Cognitive radio is an emerging smart wireless communications technology that will be able to find and connect with any nearby open radio frequency to best serve the user. Thus, a cognitive radio should be able to switch from a band of the radio spectrum that is blocked by interference to a free one to complete a transmission link, a capability that is particularly important in an emergency. Adaptive software will enable these intelligent devices to reconfigure their functions to meet the demands of communications networks or consumers as needed....

When the soccer video game FIFA 14 went on sale this past fall, it boasted a ball that, at long last, could sail smartly through the air. In earlier versions of the popular game, the ball sometimes became a bit “floaty,” soaring along an unrealistically linear path. Last year a team of engineers and animators vowed to get to the bottom of the problem. After an intense audit of all the projectile physics code in the game, they found the problem: their drag coefficient was wrong....

People who are resuscitated from near death often report strange sensory phenomena, such as memories “flashing before their eyes.” Now a rare assessment of brain activity just before death offers clues about why such experiences occur. Anesthesiologist Lakhmir Chawla of George Washington University Medical Center and his colleagues recently published a retrospective analysis of brain activity in seven sedated, critically ill patients as they were removed from life support. Using EEG recordings of neural electrical activity, Chawla found a brief but significant spike at or near the time of death—despite a preceding loss of blood pressure and associated drop in brain activity....

Where was the cone? We had just pulled up our drill pipe, replaced its worn drill bit, and lowered it back down to the seafloor, a mile under our ship. Crowding into the control room, we watched images from a camera attached to the end of the pipe, looking for a cone we had left as a marker to guide the pipe back to the hole we were drilling. The team had gone through this exercise many times before....

California likes to think of itself as being ahead of the curve. So when the state set out to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, regulators did all the right things - stringent tailpipe standards for cars, tighter codes for buildings, higher renewable energy standards for utilities. Then they took one of the most aggressive energy-saving steps of all. They started a campaign to save water. The link between energy and water is not always apparent, but the two are as intertwined as the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in a bottle of Evian....

Entrepreneur is just a fancy French word for a salesman, and a sales pitch isn’t necessarily constrained by the laws of physics or economics. These folks don’t so much have a business as an argument—or a business proposition as the cliché goes. Chris Gronet, the founder of Gronet Industries which became Solyndra and, more recently, defunct, was one such entrepreneur who visited the offices of Scientific American in the fall of 2008....

Superstorm Sandy’s left hook into the Jersey Shore. Flooding in Europe. Heat waves in Russia. In the past few years, extreme weather events like these have captured public attention as potential examples of a brave new world of weather, brought to you courtesy of climate change. Last year, Rutgers climate scientist Jennifer Francis gained scientific – and media – attention for proposing an explanation for how climate change is leading to more events like these....

The Face behind the Skull —Tara Haelle Researchers can now use CT scans to predict physical characteristics from a skull, as reported in The Journal of Craniofacial Surgery. Twitter Opens Its Cage —Melinda Wenner Moyer Twitter announced in February that it will make all tweets available to researchers for study. What Is It? Kidney Stone —Annie Sneed This kidney stone can be found at Wellcome ImagesK. The new lens design for kidney stone removal was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....

By Eugenie Samuel ReichSome time in the next decade, a U.S. president will probably be presented with this dilemma: Is it worth spending $1 billion to deflect a space rock that may never hit Earth?A NASA panel is wrestling with this question, which is growing more pertinent as scientists’ ability to find asteroids that pose a potential risk, termed near-Earth objects (NEOs), outstrips their capacity to track them accurately. The Ad-Hoc Task Force on Planetary Defense, set up to suggest ways for the agency to protect Earth against a deadly impact, is expected to release its report next month....

A certain type of brain cell may be linked with suicide, according to a recent investigation. People who take their own lives have more densely packed von Economo neurons, large spindle-shaped cells that have dramatically increased in density over the course of human evolution. Researchers in Germany analyzed the roots of suicide in the brain by focusing on a neural network linked with psychological pain, which includes regions such as the anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula, where von Economo neurons are concentrated....

Researchers have created a coating that reflects almost no light, potentially showing the way to more effective light-emitting diodes (LEDs), solar cells and other devices. The material reflects several times less light than standard antireflection coatings used to enhance the efficiency of electronic devices such as lasers. Light reflects when it passes between two substances that differ in refractive index, or the speed of light through a material—the bigger the gap between the indexes, the brighter the reflection....

By Ryan McNeill (Reuters) - As sea levels rise, tidal flooding along the U.S. coast is likely to become so common that parts of many communities, including the nation’s capital, could become unusable within three decades, according to a new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists. Rising sea levels create a higher platform for tides and storm surges. Scientists compare the effect to slam dunks in basketball: Raising the gymnasium floor would increase the number of slam dunks per game....

Under a microscope, a pathologist searching through the damaged nerve cells in a brain tissue sample from a patient who has died of Alzheimer’s disease can make out strange clumps of material. They consist of proteins that clearly do not belong there. Where did they come from, and why are there so many of them? And most important, what do they have to do with this devastating and incurable disorder? The search for answers has turned up a startling discovery: the clumped proteins in Alzheimer’s and other major neurodegenerative diseases behave very much like prions, the toxic proteins that destroy the brain in mad cow disease....

Some 80,000 people are held in solitary confinement in U.S. prisons, according to the latest available census. The practice has grown with seemingly little thought to how isolation affects a person’s psyche. But new research suggests that solitary confinement creates more violence both inside and outside prison walls. Prisoners in solitary confinement—also known as administrative segregation—spend 22 to 24 hours a day in small, featureless cells. Contact with other humans is practically nonexistent....

If extra dimensions of space exist, they must be smaller than about half the width of a human hair, according to new measurements of the strength of gravity at short distances. Researchers found that the same law governing the gravitational pull between planets continues to work when objects are separated by as little as 56 micrometers. The finding rules out extra dimensions of 44 micrometers or larger, they report in this week’s Physical Review Letters....

Editor’s note: On January 20, 2013, an expedition called the Shackleton Epic will begin an attempt to be the first team to authentically re-create Sir Ernest Shackleton’s voyage of survival crossing 800 nautical miles of the treacherous southern ocean, from Elephant Island to South Georgia, and the climb over it. You can follow the group’s exploits online. You can get a sense of the danger involved to the first explorers to the poles a century ago from the Scientific American Classics special digital edition, Tragedy and Triumph: The Heroic Age of Polar Exploration (July 2012)....

Despite the mid-March thaw this week, this past winter will long be remembered for record snowfall across much of the U.S. Weeks of snowstorms, bitter cold, dangerous commutes and backbreaking shoveling sessions can can harden even the season’s most avid fans. Still, for anyone standing in a gentle snowfall for the first time, watching the air turn into little bits of fluffy ice, the experience can be magical. And if the snow falls through particularly cold air, which holds less moisture than does warmer air, you will often hear tiny squeaks walking (or driving) through it....