Findings

A boost for fuel cells
The dream of generating electricity cleanly and cheaply with fuel cells is getting closer to reality, thanks to innovations emerging from the lab of Maria Flytzani-Stephanopoulos, professor of chemical and biological engineering. Fuel cells generate electricity from hydrogen, which they extract from hydrocarbon fuel. But the technology is costly, partly because the catalysts that extract the hydrogen contain precious metals. Using catalysts based on an inexpensive rare earth called cerium oxide, the Tufts researchers can reduce the amount of gold or platinum to one-tenth the usual quantity. The catalysts have another useful property: they easily absorb hydrogen sulfide, a gas that damages large, high-temperature fuel cells of the type that someday may power whole cities.

down on the job
Job performance may be one of the last corners of a person’s life to rebound after a bout with depression. Debra Lerner, associate professor of medicine, and David Adler, professor of psychiatry, spent 18 months tracking workers being treated for depression. In the end, patients who had been pronounced “clinically improved” still did worse at mental, interpersonal, time management, output, and physical tasks than healthy control subjects did. The researchers (writing in the September issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry) recommend that practitioners pay more attention to patients’ ability to work and that employers offer services such as occupational health clinics for depressed workers.

bone from spider silk
Suppose you were a surgeon who wanted to regrow a missing section of bone. You’d need some kind of scaffold for bone tissues to grow on—something as strong as silk and as stiff as glass. David Kaplan, professor of biomedical engineering, and colleagues have just the stuff. They fused two genes—one from a spider (the golden silk orb weaver), the other from a diatom, a single-cell plankton with a glassy exterior—to produce a unique silk coated with microscopic beads of glassy silica. The material can be formed as a film or a fiber. Now produced only in vitro, the material could eventually find uses such as guiding the growth of hip replacements.