Two Cornell faculty members have been elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society.The Cornell electees are Lara Estroff, chair of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Herbert Fisk Johnson Professor of Industrial Chemistry in Cornell Duffield College of Engineering; and Klaas van Wijk, professor in the School of Integrative Plant Science, Plant Biology Section, in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

A high acid environment is great for a snappy hydrogen oxidation reaction – the reaction at the heart of a clean-energy fuel cell. The problem is the only catalysts that won’t dissolve in the high acid of traditional fuel cells are precious metals – platinum, palladium and the like – and they are very expensive. To advance fuel cell technologies and lower their cost, the Abruña and Muller Groups at Cornell and other researchers in the Center for Alkaline-based Energy Solutions (CABES) work on fuel cells in alkaline, or nonacidic, environments. They have developed a nonprecious metal catalyst – nickel coated with carbon – that works well in alkaline media, maintaining a strong hydrogen oxidation reaction activity.

Preserving quantum information is key to developing useful quantum computing systems. But interacting quantum systems are chaotic and follow laws of thermodynamics, eventually leading to information loss. Physicists have long known of a strange exception, called dynamical freezing, when quantum systems shaken at precisely tuned frequencies evade these laws. But how long can this phenomenon postpone thermodynamics? Not forever, but for an astonishingly long time, Cornell physicists have determined, giving the first quantitative answer.

For his contributions to developing the highest resolution electron microscope in the world, David Muller, the Samuel B. Eckert Professor in the School of Applied and Engineering Physics at the Cornell Duffield College of Engineering, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering.