This week in charts
Giving up gains
Retail investor flows
Alberta’s growth is back
Organic lithium-ion batteries one step closer to becoming reality
A recent discovery by researchers at Japan’s Tohoku University and the University of California, Los Angeles has moved the needle one step closer to realizing metal-free, high-energy, and inexpensive batteries by using a small organic molecule, croconic acid.
In a paper published in Advanced Science, the researchers explain that unlike conventional lithium-ion batteries, which are highly dependent on materials such as cobalt and lithium, organic batteries exploit naturally abundant elements such as carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen.
In addition, organic batteries have greater theoretical capacities than conventional lithium-ion batteries because their use of organic materials renders them lightweight.
Most reported organic batteries to date, however, possess a relatively low (1-3V) working voltage. This means that increasing organic batteries’ voltage will lead to higher energy density batteries.
Knowing this, the Tohoku University and UCLA groups set up to study croconic acid and found that when used as a lithium-ion battery cathode material, it maintains a strong working voltage of around 4 V.
Why Nordstrom Steamed Ahead as Old Navy Sank
Goodbye, sweatpants; hello, dress pants.
A clear signal from apparel retailers reporting results lately is that customers are finally starting to dress like adults again. But, just as with the customers they attract, there are haves and have-nots: Brands with higher price tags are feeling much less of a pinch from inflation than affordable ones.
Among Gap’s portfolio of brands, Banana Republic, which sells dressier, work-relevant clothes, saw sales in the quarter ended April 30 grow 24% compared with a year earlier while sales for more value-, comfort-focused Old Navy declined 19%, compounded by self-inflicted inventory woes. Sales of women’s suiting, dresses and skirts at Banana Republic grew 62%, while men’s suit sales nearly doubled. Urban Outfitters saw its pricier brands, Anthropologie and Free People, fare far better last quarter than its namesake brand, which caters to younger buyers.
A similar dynamic played out among department stores. Macy’s saw sales at its luxury department-store chain Bloomingdale’s rise 27% last quarter compared with 10% at its namesake chain. Macy’s Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Gennette said on an earnings call on Thursday that luxury sales were a “standout” for the business, noting that shopping among high-income consumers has so far remained less affected by inflation. Nordstrom, another luxury department-store chain, saw sales in its quarter ended April 30 surge nearly 19% or almost twice the gain analysts polled by FactSet had expected.
It isn’t entirely surprising that higher earning consumers—who were more likely to have worked remotely during the pandemic—are now shopping for clothes that go along with their travel, socializing and back-to-office plans. With hybrid working arrangements likely to become the norm for office workers, returnees might splurge on fewer but fancier items.
This week’s fun finds
Future fusion reactions inside tokamaks could produce much more energy than previously thought, thanks to groundbreaking new research that found a foundational law for such reactors was wrong.
The research, led by physicists from the Swiss Plasma Center at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EFPL), has determined that the maximum hydrogen fuel density is about twice the “Greenwald Limit” – an estimate derived from experiments more than 30 years ago.
The discovery that fusion reactors can actually work with hydrogen plasma densities that are much higher than the Greenwald Limit they are built for will influence the operation of the massive ITER tokamak being built in southern France, and greatly affect the designs of ITER's successors, called the Demonstration power plant (DEMO) fusion reactors, said physicist Paolo Ricci at the Swiss Plasma Center.
Future fusion
Donut-shaped tokamaks are the one of the most promising designs for nuclear fusion reactors that could one day be used to generate electricity for power grids.
Scientists have worked for more than 50 years to make controlled fusion a reality; unlike nuclear fission, which makes energy from smashing apart very large atomic nuclei, nuclear fusion could generate even more energy by joining very small nuclei together.
The fusion process creates much less radioactive waste than fission, and the neutron-rich hydrogen it uses for its fuel is comparatively easy to obtain.
The same process powers stars like the sun, which is why controlled fusion is likened to a “star in a jar;” but because the very high pressure at the heart of a star isn’t feasible on Earth, fusion reactions down here require temperatures hotter than the sun to operate.
Several fusion power projects are now at an advanced stage, and some researchers think the first tokamak to generate electricity for the grid could be working by 2030, Live Science previously reported.
How to know what you really want
Claire, a smart, ambitious student at Tulane University in Louisiana, was on track to have her pick of law schools, but she decided she’d like to get some real-world experience – and have some fun – in New Orleans first. She landed a job as a paralegal, spending her days researching expert witnesses to defend Big Pharma cases, and that’s when the crisis came. Claire had always loved cooking and learning about humanity through cuisine. She was like a female Anthony Bourdain trapped inside an overworked paralegal, and it was slowly making her life miserable.
She began to entertain thoughts of leaving the law firm and working in a kitchen or a coffee shop until she could figure out how to make a career out of her lifelong interest in food. But doubts haunted her. What would other people think? Maybe she’s not that driven. Maybe she’s not that smart, after all. Maybe she’s lazy. What other people expected her to want to do – and her ability to meet those expectations – began to determine her self-worth.
Many people face dilemmas like Claire’s. Each of us is occasionally overwhelmed by a multitude of competing desires: pursue job offer A or B? Start a new relationship or stay single? Sign up to run a marathon, or enjoy not getting up early to train? But life is full of marathons, and they don’t necessarily involve running. It’s good to know which desires to pursue and which ones to leave behind – to know which marathons are worth running.
Desire is a social process – it is mimetic When it comes to understanding the mystery of desire, one contemporary thinker stands above all others: the French social theorist René Girard, a historian-turned-polymath who came to the United States shortly after the Second World War and taught at numerous US universities, including Johns Hopkins and Stanford. By the time he died in 2015, he had been named to the Académie Française and was considered one of the greatest minds of the 20th century.
Girard realized one peculiar feature of desire: ‘We would like our desires to come from our deepest selves, our personal depths,’ he said, ‘but if it did, it would not be desire. Desire is always for something we feel we lack.’ Girard noted that desire is not, as we often imagine it, something that we ourselves fully control. It is not something that we can generate or manufacture on our own. It is largely the product of a social process.
