Electrochemistry News Items & Facts - May 2024

Every day, we all use battery powered devices at home, drive vehicles, eat packaged foods, and drink clean water. These are a few examples of the countless aspects of our modern lifestyles which are reliant on electrochemistry - broadly defined as the study of how electricity interacts with materials.

As an electrochemistry instrumentation company, Admiral Instruments proudly serves our customers who are among the millions of scientists, engineers, & technicians around the world using potentiostats and battery cyclers to uncover new ways electrochemistry may benefit us all.

To celebrate how electrochemistry has shaped the past, touches our present-day lives, and influences the future, every month Admiral Instruments posts five notable news articles, publications, & trivia somehow related to electrochemistry. Click on each entry to read more from the source article!

Electrochemistry News Items & Facts for May 2024:

1. Only somewhere between 1%-5% of the world's rare earth elements, known as "lanthanides" on the periodic table, are currently recycled.
   

2. Lanthanides are known as "rare" earth elements, but the least common rare earth element (lutetium) is 200x more abundant than gold. Cerium, the most common of the rare earth elements, is more abundant than copper.
   

3. Electronic waste represents about 2% of all the waste in a landfill, but represents about 70% of all hazardous waste in a landfill.
   

4. Launching a rocket into space requires around 90% of the rocket's initial weight to consist of fuel, but this could be reduced by transmitting power to the rocket through a microwave beam.
   

5. Spintronics is an emerging technology for next-generation nanoelectronics, reducing power user and increasing memory/speed by using the spin of electrons as a degree of freedom for encoding information.