Author: Drew McCullough

UA team discover process to turn waste sulfur into plastic

ssociate professor of chemistry and biochemistry, began this project in 2010 when the UA gave him funding to explore a new area of batteries.

Pyun said he didn’t want to work with lithium-ion batteries, which are the most common in portable electronic devices, because it would be hard to distinguish himself in that area.

Instead, Pyun turned to lithium-sulfur batteries, which have a lot of potential and one big drawback.

Pyun said lithium-sulfur batteries store five times more energy than ion batteries, but they don’t last nearly as long.

“Typical lithium-ion batteries can go through 500 to 1,000 charge-discharge-charge cycles,” he said. “For these lithium-sulfur batteries, you’re dead before even 100 cycles.”

Pyun and his team made it their goal to give lithium-sulfur batteries a much longer lifetime. The team then began studying the chemistry of sulfur.

Read the full story as it appeared in the Arizona Daily Star here.

Drilling for clues to our ancestors’ extinction

Drilling for clues to our ancestors’ extinction

A UA professor recently began a lakebed drilling project in the African Rift Valley to determine what role climate change may have played in the evolution of humans and, maybe, how it will affect us in the future.

Andy Cohen, the principal investigator of the Hominin Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project and a UA professor of geosciences, began drilling with his team last summer in Kenya at a site in the Tugen Hills.

The team of more than 50 scientists from nine countries has received multiple grants to fund the project, including a recent $4.78 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

The team is targeting core samples of lakebed deposits that show certain time intervals, Cohen said. Three of the team’s five drilling sites are in areas that have existing Hominin records, he said.

Read the full story as it appeared in the Arizona Daily Star here.

Forget Google glasses, think UA goggles

Forget Google glasses, think UA goggles

Hong Hua, a UA associate professor of optical sciences, is developing a variety of wearable head-mounted display systems that could potentially have many real-world applications.

Think Google Glass — but with a bigger screen and more possibilities.

Read the full story as it appeared in the Arizona Daily Star here.

The Milky Way is bursting with new stars in University of Arizona study

The Milky Way is bursting with new stars in University of Arizona study

A Steward Observatory astronomer recently completed the largest survey of dense molecular gas in the Milky Way galaxy — the regions where stars are formed.

Yancy Shirley, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, said the study will allow astronomers to better understand how stars form and galaxies evolve.

Read the full story as it appeared in the Arizona Daily Star here.

Here’s the windup, the pitch, the vector and the Pythagorean theorem

Here’s the windup, the pitch, the vector and the Pythagorean theorem

The Science of Baseball Program was created by Ricardo Valerdi, an associate professor of systems and industrial engineering at the University of Arizona.

Valerdi designed the program to get middle school students interested in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and math by teaching various concepts through the lens of baseball.

“The idea,” Valerdi said, “is if you interact with the math, you begin to understand it much better.”

The program has reached about 2,000 kids and gained the attention of major league teams including the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Since creating the program last fall, Valerdi has developed a curriculum of eight lessons, all of which focus on the common core standards that middle school students must master for standardized tests.

It covers subjects such as geometry, measurement and data, ratios and proportional relationships, and statistics and probability.

The standards are taught in the classroom and in an outdoor, hands-on fashion.

Read the full story as it appeared in the Arizona Daily Star here.

Active vs. Passive Rainwater Harvesting

Active rainwater harvesting is when rainwater is captured and stored in large metal cisterns so it can be used later. On the other hand, passive rainwater harvesting is when rainwater runoff is redirected from buildings to benefit the landscape. According to Fernando Molina, the public information officer for Tucson Water, there are many benefits to both types of rainwater harvesting.