LMiC at Thermag

LMiC at Thermag VIII - International Conference on Caloric Cooling.

LMiC at Thermag

Lucas Paixão presenting our paper titled "Supergiant barocaloric effects in acetoxy silicone rubber around room temperature".
The paper is available at https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.01761

Nature: the truth? Or lack of sincerity?

Nature journal has published recently an editorial text [Nature 556, 5 (2018)] entitled “Nature: the truth” (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04024-4?utm_source=twt_nnc&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=naturenews&sf186201391=1).

There, we read a list of myths about Nature’s editorial processes and policies. Although we agree with most of them, we disagree with “Myth 4: The authorship of a paper — including country and institution — influences Nature’s decision on whether to referee or publish it. Untrue”. Based on several colleagues’ statements and our own experience, we think that “Myth 4” is not a myth.
Recently, we have submitted 3 papers presenting outstanding findings about barocaloric effect. Part of these findings concern the highest barocaloric values reported so far. These papers, which have only Brazilian authors, were not considered for revision by editors from Nature Communications, for instance. The curious fact is that less remarkable papers about barocaloric effect, reporting much smaller barocaloric values, were published in the same journal just before and just after our submissions.
If there was a non Brazilian "famous" author in our papers, would they have been considered for revision? Probably, yes.
In the rejection emails from Nature group, the editors should be more honest and say: "we cannot publish your paper because we do not trust you".

LMiC at Thermag

LMiC at Thermag VIII - International Conference on Caloric Cooling.

SBPMat Bulletin: Rubber under pressure for solid-state cooling

A team of researchers from Brazil has found that vulcanized natural rubber prevails over any other material already studied in its capacity to change temperature by being compressed and decompressed – a phenomenon known as “barocaloric effect.”

The discovery opens up interesting possibilities of using vulcanized natural rubber in advanced applications, especially in the area of “solid-state cooling.” This term refers to refrigeration systems (such as refrigerators or air conditioners) that are based on the use of solid state refrigerant materials to absorb the heat of the system to be cooled and transferred to an external environment. Conventional devices use fluids (gaseous and liquid states). The research was reported in an article recently published in ACS Macro Letters, a journal of the American Chemical Society publisher in the field of Polymer Science and the related matters, whose impact factor is 6,185.

“Since natural rubber heats up when pressed (more than 20 degrees above the initial temperature) and cools when the pressure is released (at least 20 degrees below the initial temperature), we believe it can be used as refrigerant material in a refrigerator,” explains Alexandre Magnus Gomes Carvalho, researcher at the Brazilian Synchrotron Light Laboratory (LNLS) and corresponding author of the article.

Read more at: https://www.sbpmat.org.br/en/tag/efeito-barocalorico/

Nature: the truth?

Nature journal has just published an editorial text [Nature 556, 5 (2018)] entitled “Nature: the truth” (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04024-4?utm_source=twt_nnc&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=naturenews&sf186201391=1).

There, we read a list of myths about Nature’s editorial processes and policies. Although we agree with most of them, we disagree with “Myth 4: The authorship of a paper — including country and institution — influences Nature’s decision on whether to referee or publish it. Untrue”. Based on several colleagues’ statements and our own experience, we think that “Myth 4” is not a myth. At this moment, we have a paper submitted to a journal from Nature group. We will wait for the end of this process to give more details about our experience on this “myth”.