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runlai_jiang

GE Power, in Need of a Lift, Chases Tesla and Siemens in Batteries - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...s-next-big-business-1520420401

General electric Sodium-based battery competition technology

shared by runlai_jiang on 07 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • The giant platform called GE Reservoir is expected to store electricity generated by wind turbines and solar panels for later use. The battery-storage market is expected to grow in coming years as some utilities look for less-expensive alternatives to the power plants that fire up during peak hours to meet power demand.
  • Siemens, one of GE’s biggest rivals in the power business, paired with AES Corp. last year to launch Fluence Energy LLC, a joint venture that is building what is expected to be the world’s largest lithium-ion battery in California. IHS Markit predicts the global market for batteries in the power sector will grow 14% annually through 2025.
  • The company tried making batteries using sodium-based technologie
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  • Success would be a needed boost for the struggling conglomerate, which is in the middle of restructuring and said last week it would overhaul its board. GE is seeking access to a market that Navigant Research predicts will generate tens of billions of dollars in revenue in the next decade or so.
  • Prices of lithium-ion batteries have dropped sharply in recent years, as they have become ubiquitous in products such as laptops and smartphones, improving the economies of scale of manufacturing. That is start
  • GE is hoping to change that with the Reservoir platform. GE says the Reservoir battery can last about 15% longer than the best batteries currently on the market and can be installed quicker.
Javier E

Older Americans Are 'Hooked' on Vitamins - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...amins-dietary-supplements.html

vitamins health supplements research

shared by Javier E on 05 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • When she was a young physician, Dr. Martha Gulati noticed that many of her mentors were prescribing vitamin E and folic acid to patients. Preliminary studies in the early 1990s had linked both supplements to a lower risk of heart disease.She urged her father to pop the pills as well: “Dad, you should be on these vitamins, because every cardiologist is taking them or putting their patients on [them],” recalled Dr. Gulati, now chief of cardiology for the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix
  • But just a few years later, she found herself reversing course, after rigorous clinical trials found neither vitamin E nor folic acid supplements did anything to protect the heart. Even worse, studies linked high-dose vitamin E to a higher risk of heart failure, prostate cancer and death from any cause.
  • More than half of Americans take vitamin supplements, including 68 percent of those age 65 and older, according to a 2013 Gallup poll. Among older adults, 29 percent take four or more supplements of any kind
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  • Often, preliminary studies fuel irrational exuberance about a promising dietary supplement, leading millions of people to buy in to the trend. Many never stop. They continue even though more rigorous studies — which can take many years to complete — almost never find that vitamins prevent disease, and in some cases cause harm
  • There’s no conclusive evidence that dietary supplements prevent chronic disease in the average American, Dr. Manson said. And while a handful of vitamin and mineral studies have had positive results, those findings haven’t been strong enough to recommend supplements to the general American public, she said.
  • The National Institutes of Health has spent more than $2.4 billion since 1999 studying vitamins and minerals. Yet for “all the research we’ve done, we don’t have much to show for it,” said Dr. Barnett Kramer, director of cancer prevention at the National Cancer Institute.
  • A big part of the problem, Dr. Kramer said, could be that much nutrition research has been based on faulty assumptions, including the notion that people need more vitamins and minerals than a typical diet provides; that megadoses are always safe; and that scientists can boil down the benefits of vegetables like broccoli into a daily pill.
  • when researchers tried to deliver the key ingredients of a healthy diet in a capsule, Dr. Kramer said, those efforts nearly always failed.
  • It’s possible that the chemicals in the fruits and vegetables on your plate work together in ways that scientists don’t fully understand — and which can’t be replicated in a table
  • More important, perhaps, is that most Americans get plenty of the essentials, anyway. Although the Western diet has a lot of problems — too much sodium, sugar, saturated fat and calories, in general — it’s not short on vitamins
  • Without even realizing it, someone who eats a typical lunch or breakfast “is essentially eating a multivitamin,”
  • The body naturally regulates the levels of many nutrients, such as vitamin C and many B vitamins, Dr. Kramer said, by excreting what it doesn’t need in urine. He added: “It’s hard to avoid getting the full range of vitamins.”
  • Not all experts agree. Dr. Walter Willett, a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, says it’s reasonable to take a daily multivitamin “for insurance.” Dr. Willett said that clinical trials underestimate supplements’ true benefits because they aren’t long enough, often lasting five to 10 years. It could take decades to notice a lower rate of cancer or heart disease in vitamin taker
  • For Charlsa Bentley, 67, keeping up with the latest nutrition research can be frustrating. She stopped taking calcium, for example, after studies found it doesn’t protect against bone fractures. Additional studies suggest that calcium supplements increase the risk of kidney stones and heart disease.
  • People who take vitamins tend to be healthier, wealthier and better educated than those who don’t, Dr. Kramer said. They are probably less likely to succumb to heart disease or cancer, whether they take supplements or not. That can skew research results, making vitamin pills seem more effective than they really are
  • Because folic acid can lower homocysteine levels, researchers once hoped that folic acid supplements would prevent heart attacks and strokes.In a series of clinical trials, folic acid pills lowered homocysteine levels but had no overall benefit for heart disease, Dr. Lichtenstein said
  • When studies of large populations showed that people who eat lots of seafood had fewer heart attacks, many assumed that the benefits came from the omega-3 fatty acids in fish oil, Dr. Lichtenstein said.Rigorous studies have failed to show that fish oil supplements prevent heart attacks
  • But it’s possible the benefits of sardines and salmon have nothing to do with fish oil, Dr. Lichtenstein said. People who have fish for dinner may be healthier as a result of what they don’t eat, such as meatloaf and cheeseburgers.
  • “Eating fish is probably a good thing, but we haven’t been able to show that taking fish oil [supplements] does anything for you,
  • In the tiny amounts provided by fruits and vegetables, beta carotene and similar substances appear to protect the body from a process called oxidation, which damages healthy cells, said Dr. Edgar Miller, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.Experts were shocked when two large, well-designed studies in the 1990s found that beta carotene pills actually increased lung cancer rates.
  • Likewise, a clinical trial published in 2011 found that vitamin E, also an antioxidant, increased the risk of prostate cancer in men by 17 percent
  • “Vitamins are not inert,” said Dr. Eric Klein, a prostate cancer expert at the Cleveland Clinic who led the vitamin E study. “They are biologically active agents. We have to think of them in the same way as drugs. If you take too high a dose of them, they cause side effects.”
  • “We should be responsible physicians,” she said, “and wait for the data.”
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