On the efficacy of electrocatalysis in nonaqueous Li-O2 batteries.

Heterogeneous electrocatalysis has become a focal point in rechargeable Li-air battery research to reduce overpotentials in both the oxygen reduction (discharge) and especially oxygen evolution (charge) reactions. In this study, we show that past reports of traditional cathode electrocatalysis in nonaqueous Li-O(2) batteries were indeed true, but that gas evolution related to electrolyte solvent decomposition was the dominant process being catalyzed. In dimethoxyethane, where Li(2)O(2) formation is the dominant product of the electrochemistry, no catalytic activity (compared to pure carbon) is observed using the same (Au, Pt, MnO(2)) nanoparticles.

Sequence-independent helical wrapping of single-walled carbon nanotubes by long genomic DNA.

Because of their nanometer sizes and molecular recognition capabilities, biological systems have garnered much attention as vehicles for the directed assembly of nanoscale materials.(1-6) One of the greatest challenges of this research has been to successfully interface biological systems with electronic materials, such as semiconductors and metals. As a means to address some of these issues, Sarikaya, Belcher, and others have used a combinatorial technique called phage display(7-9) to discover new families of peptides that showed binding affinities to various substrates.

Enhanced autocompensating quantum cryptography system.

We have improved the hardware and software of our autocompensating system for quantum key distribution by replacing bulk optical components at the end stations with fiber-optic equivalents and implementing software that synchronizes end-station activities, communicates basis choices, corrects errors, and performs privacy amplification over a local area network. The all-fiber-optic arrangement provides stable, efficient, and high-contrast routing of the photons. The low-bit error rate leads to high error-correction efficiency and minimizes data sacrifice during privacy amplification.