Building a brighter future for Africa with the African Light Source.

Africa is the only habitable continent that is not yet host to a light source - an important tool across disciplines. Scientists from the Executive Committee of the African Light Source Foundation discuss work towards building an advanced light source in Africa, and what remains to be done.

Three dimensional vanadium pentoxide/graphene foam composite as positive electrode for high performance asymmetric electrochemical supercapacitor.

The electrochemical performance of hydrothermal synthesized three dimensional (3D) orthorhombic vanadium pentoxide (VO) nanosheets and vanadium pentoxide/graphene foam (VO/GF) composites at different mass loading of GF were successfully studied. The optimized VO/GF-150 mg composite provided a high specific capacity of 73 mA h g, which was much higher than that the pristine VO (60 mA h g) nanosheets at a specific current of 1 A g. A hybrid capacitor was also fabricated by adopting a carbon-based negative electrode obtained from the pyrolysis of an iron-PANI polymer (C-Fe/PANI) mixture and the 3D VO/GF-150 mg composite as the positive electrode in 6 M KOH electrolyte.

Comparing results of X-ray diffraction, µ-Raman spectroscopy and neutron diffraction when identifying chemical phases in seized nuclear material, during a comparative nuclear forensics exercise.

This work presents the results for identification of chemical phases obtained by several laboratories as a part of an international nuclear forensic round-robin exercise. In this work powder X-ray diffraction (p-XRD) is regarded as the reference technique. Neutron diffraction produced a superior high-angle diffraction pattern relative to p-XRD.