What if the reviewer is 11 years old – a challenge for EPFL scientist

Writing an article and getting it published in a top scientific journal is something EPFL Professors Jeremy Luterbacher and Berend Smit know how to do. Getting the same article past the reviewers of Frontiers for Young Minds (FYM) however, is a different matter. FYM is a scientific journal aimed at 8-15 year-olds. Authors are challenged to rewrite a recent article about their latest research for this audience. Before these articles get published, they are reviewed by elementary and middleschool students. And 11 year-old reviewers are tough, it turns out. How often does a scientist get a review that bluntly states: “The authors succeeded in putting me to sleep after the second paragraph”?

The articles featured in FYM cover cutting-edge discoveries in various fields of science. The journal’s Editorial Board invites authors to rewrite an article they recently published for a younger audience. The article is then reviewed by a Young Mind Reviewer to help the authors to make the article better understandable for a younger readership. The final articles are freely available from the FYM website.

Energy articles
Professor Jeremy Luterbacher, who heads EPFL’s Laboratory of Sustainable and Catalytic Processing, took his recent Science article on a novel process for biomass to energy conversion, and rewrote it for FYM. “Nonenzymatic Sugar Production from Biomass Using Biomass-Derived γ-Valerolactone” became “Break it Down! How Scientists are Making Fuel Out of Plants”. The article presents Luterbacher’s breakthrough discovery that, to transform cellulose-containing biomass into liquid fuels, one can use a solvent mixture of biomass-derived g-valerolactone, water, and dilute acid (instead of concentrated acid or ionic liquid solvents, or cellulase enzymes). To get the article past the Young Minds review process, he had to explain this in terms of hot chocolate, nail polish, foot races, and salad dressings. And he had to make clear how all this is related to climate change and the fuel that their school bus runs on.

A second article, by Professor Berend Smit of EPFL’s School of Basic Sciences and Director of EPFL’s Energy Center, presents the idea of computational methods for materials discovery. “Computer Aided Search for materials to store natural gas for vehicles” is based on Smit’s 2015 Energy & Environmental Science paper “The materials genome in action: identifying the performance limits for methane storage”, in which he shows how in silico screening of an entire class of nano-porous materials can be used to search for high-performance adsorbent materials for methane storage. In the FYM article, Smit begins by introducing the concept of energy density, and why this is a critical issue for fuel storage. He then explains how a “flight simulator for molecules” can help us find the materials that perform best on this criterion. Better still: the computer simulations can predict the maximally achievable performance for a whole class of materials. At this point, Smit leaves his young readers with a difficult question: what to do if a government agency sets targets which your calculations show are impossible to reach?

Berend Smit is one of the editors in chief of FYM; he welcomes suggestions for articles, and he would like to hear from Young Minds who would like to challenge the writing of the world’s top researchers!