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Students march through the streets of Wellington during the climate strike. (Photo by Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)
Students march through the streets of Wellington during the climate strike. (Photo by Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

ScienceJune 4, 2019

The cure for climate change could be in our own backyard

Guest writer
Students march through the streets of Wellington during the climate strike. (Photo by Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)
Students march through the streets of Wellington during the climate strike. (Photo by Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

Climate treaties, sustainability goals and energy commitments are proliferating around the world. The answers to these targets must involve new materials and research in this area is happening in New Zealand, writes Dr Geoff Willmott.

Last Friday, students across the country walked out of school for the second time this year in protest against climate change inaction, joining their peers from more than a hundred countries. The current imperative for action on climate, energy and sustainability issues is clear. We must use less fossil fuel, or figure out how to capture the emissions. We want to keep our waterways clean, and to protect our coastlines from erosion and pollution. We need new, more sustainable modes of living, while still retaining a good quality of life, with hopefully pain-free transitions.

All of a sudden, microplastics, nitrate concentrations, and exploration permits are dinner-table discussion items. The Zero Carbon Bill is being debated in parliament, energy capability in Taranaki is being proactively realigned following the Just Transition summit this month, and the number of businesses joining the Climate Leaders’ Coalition is nearing 100.

When a new sustainability target is proposed, it is usually recognized that it won’t be reached by continuing with the status quo, and also that organizational change can only get you so far. To reach an aspirational target, technologies that do not yet exist will be required. So how do these advances actually get done?

Materials science, which is what we do at the MacDiarmid Institute, must be a central part of the answer. As materials scientists, we spend our time developing and exploring new materials (or ‘matter’, or ‘stuff’), trying to find new and interesting properties. If you want to store energy more efficiently and use more sustainable materials than lithium-ion batteries, then you will need to build batteries using new and better combinations of materials. If you want to reduce CO2 emissions by improving capture of gases at an industrial plant, you need to have a material that is better at storing or separating gases than what we have at the moment. If you want to build a hydrogen economy, then you will want to develop catalysts and processes to efficiently produce hydrogen using renewable energy sources.

MacDiarmid Institute Principal Investigator and Massey University Professor Shane Telfer and PhD student Omid Taheri in the lab where they’re exploring the potential of metal organic framework to match the size and shape CO2 molecules (photo: supplied).

Understanding and developing new materials can seem like a fairly innocuous corner of scientific endeavour. Yet materials science affects your household and lifestyle as much if not more than any field of research, and we have world-leading materials scientists working here in New Zealand.

At the MacDiarmid Institute, our people have become deeply motivated by the rather intimidating mission of the survival of our species, and this has become a more intensive focus of our research. Last week, our Techweek event featured research that’s making a difference to our chance of living safely on this planet.

We heard about research at Massey and Canterbury Universities which is exploring an exciting new class of materials known as metal-organic frameworks. These can be thought of as ‘molecular sponges’, and could be designed to efficiently store or separate gases, with obvious implications for reducing emissions. We also heard about research in Wellington to tackle the problem of enormous power consumption by data centres feeding our insatiable appetite for data storage, streaming and processing. The aim is to develop more energy efficient, faster computers using superconducting materials. Superconductors need to be operated at very low temperatures, so our researchers are addressing this challenge.

The event also included speakers from local companies that are creating solutions to our biggest problem. Hiringa Energy, based in Taranaki, has dedicated themselves to the supply of hydrogen as an alternative to fuels which emit greenhouse gases. They are aiming to meet the challenge of establishing production, distribution and refuelling infrastructure to enable adoption of hydrogen technologies. The Auckland start-up Mint Innovation has developed a chemical process for recovering valuable metals such as gold and copper from electronic waste, which otherwise ends up in landfill.

MacDiarmid Institute researcher Dr Eva Anton working in the clean lab researching new computer memory for superconductors (photo: supplied).

So the research that could help mitigate climate change is happening in our backyard, and much of it is publicly funded. Stable support for our university and CRI researchers is and will continue to be essential for making progress. However, there is nothing like an economic incentive to get things really moving, and sustainability and climate challenges are also economic opportunities. Solutions, advances, and efficiencies that are found to be effective in New Plymouth or Parnell can be exported. We can try to save the world, and we can also make a buck while we’re doing it.

Taking discoveries from the lab to the global marketplace can be difficult, but this type of story is familiar to the MacDiarmid Institute – it’s part of our DNA. We’ve come to understand innovation pathways, and are especially well-placed to identify and support the early pipeline ‘twinkles in the eye’ of researchers and entrepreneurs. With 16 spinouts from our researchers, we’re fulfilling the vision of our founder Sir Paul Callaghan that the face of the New Zealand economy can be changed through invention and manufacture of high-value products and IP, which can then be exported and leveraged globally. Our graduates are tech-savvy, socially aware, and ready to lead a new wave of progress at this essential moment.

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Some may argue that New Zealand should not strive for leadership in this area; that in a globally competitive race, we lack the scale to compete and would be better off focusing adoption of technologies developed elsewhere. However, in many cases our scientists are filing patents and attracting investors, so we know that the research is already world-leading – and we can’t adopt a technology if we don’t foster the research base that develops the relevant expertise in-country. Moreover, several key sustainability issues are local in nature, with fresh water quality perhaps the most striking example. We can also achieve scale by working together through initiatives such as Taranaki’s National New Energy Development Centre.

But most of all, we should not need to be reminded that every global New Zealand success story – ever – has held on to their aspirations in the face of challenges of scale.

The MacDiarmid Institute is the sponsor of The Spinoff’s science section. 

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Getty Images

ScienceJune 4, 2019

How to use your phone before bed and still get a good night’s sleep

Getty Images
Getty Images

It’s not the screen use that’s the problem, but the type of content we’re consuming right before sleep.

In both Europe and the US, more than 90% of adolescents have their faces buried in screens before bed. Often, this comes at a cost to sleep. Frequent screen users are much more likely to report falling asleep later, sleeping less, and waking during the night. Such difficulties are linked not only to poorer academic performance, but also increased risk of health issues such as diabetes and heart disease in later life.

As a result, teenage screen use is treated as an unhealthy addiction among much of the media. But this narrative is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the research. The problem isn’t use of screens at night, but how they’re used.

After a recent study demonstrated that limiting screen use for a week could restore normal sleep patterns in adolescents, media headlines widely hailed this as the salvation for sleep-troubled teens. However, these headlines almost exclusively ignored the fact that wearing blue-light blocking goggles was just as effective.

Exposure to alertness-inducing blue light is undoubtedly a problem – when it comes from our screens at night, it can disrupt the natural circadian rhythms that secrete sleep hormones to prepare our bodies for rest. But it’s also an easy issue to solve. Applications already exist on phones and laptops that shift the blueness of light with the time of day, sidestepping the somewhat unrealistic expectation of teenagers donning special goggles.

Content is key

There’s a much more urgent issue at the heart of the relationship between bedtime devices and sleep, not just in youth, but for all of us. The screens we watch are not devoid of content, and how we interact with them is key.

Passive activities such as reading neutral content are largely unproblematic, as long as care is taken to avoid keeping the brain whirring late into the night. The key area of concern is social media. Almost half of 13 to 17-year-olds admit to being online almost constantly, and these frequent users are much more likely to report later sleep onset, as well as waking during the night.

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But these negative impacts are also dependent on our relationship with social media, rather than our mere use of it. Work from both our own lab and others suggests that the negative impacts of social media use on sleep quality may be a result of the anxiety, depression, and lowered self-esteem that it can induce. Crucially, the negative mental health effects of social media are not inevitable, but dependent on the way we interact online. When used in the right way, screen use can actually be beneficial.

For example, time spent using image-based platforms like Instagram and Snapchat (but not text-based platforms like Twitter) is associated with decreased loneliness, possibly due to an enhanced sense of intimacy and interconnectedness. However, this benefit is dependent on using the platform to interact with other people – those who simply broadcast content actually report increased loneliness. It’s also dependent on following people you know – the more strangers you follow, the more likely you are to have depressive symptoms.

It may also surprise you to know that making social comparisons is not always problematic – what’s important is how we make them. Ability-based comparisons, such as comparing oneself to “fitspiration” posts showing body images only a few of us have the time and ability to achieve, can lead to depression and envy. Opinion-based comparisons, on the other hand, where social media users seek out the views of others to make sense of the world around them, can lead people to feel inspired and optimistic.

Healthy nighttime browsing

With that in mind, here are some tips based on the latest research on screen and social media use to help you make the best out of your evening browsing, and have a good night’s sleep.

• Use your platforms to create communities and maintain connections through interaction – too much silent browsing and self-broadcasting can harm your peace of mind, and therefore your ease of sleep. And remember – the best selves you see are not representative of real life.

• Try to reserve the last half an hour before bed not doing anything too stimulating. Putting the phone down a little while before bed is a good habit to get into, but if you are going to use it, use a blue-light blocking app, and do something passive and unemotional that will allow the sleepy feeling to come.

• If you think that activities are getting in the way of you feeling sleepy, or that household bedtime routines do not match your rhythm, then talk to someone. Sleep is important but parents sending teens off to bed before they’re ready is not always the best plan.

We need to move away from the dominant narrative of screen and social media use as an evil, as a hindrance to healthy development. Our bedtime devices needn’t be guilt-inducing vices. The online world is rich and diverse.

Like any social interaction, social media use can be damaging if navigated in the wrong way, but the virtual world it opens up can also be fulfilling, informative, and empowering. So let’s create a society that uses it healthily – not just by blocking out blue light, but by blocking out the things that make you see yourself in a blue light.The Conversation

Heather Cleland Woods is a lecturer in psychology and Holly Scott is a PhD candidate in psychology at the University of Glasgow

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.