The study is grounded in a long intellectual tradition. Sociologists from Ibn Khaldun to Montesquieu speculated about the relationship between climate and social organization, and modern researchers have built an increasingly rigorous evidence base on the topic. Econometric studies have shown that extreme weather events reduce schooling and educational attainment in settings as varied as Madagascar, Ethiopia, and the global tropics. Research published in Nature Human Behaviour found that heat exposure inhibits learning both internationally and within the United States, with each additional hot school day measurably reducing achievement. Laboratory work in ergonomics has demonstrated that both hot and cold temperature exposure degrade human performance, while building science has documented how classroom air quality and thermal comfort affect students’ subjective perception, physiological responses, and learning outcomes. What has been missing, the Turkish authors contend, is a fine-grained sociological account of how these forces play out inside actual schools, in the words of the people who inhabit them every day.

To fill that gap, Gürbüz and Sever designed a qualitative study using a phenomenological approach, a method that seeks to capture the essence of lived experience rather than to measure variables statistically. They deliberately chose two contrasting provinces. Ağrı, in eastern Turkey, is defined by a cold, continental climate with long, harsh winters in which temperatures routinely plunge far below freezing. Siirt, in the country’s southeast, endures a hot climate in which late spring and summer bring punishing heat. The comparison allowed the researchers to ask whether the same underlying mechanism, the interaction between climate and educational practice, manifests differently under opposite thermal regimes.

The research group comprised 82 participants: 27 students, 27 teachers, and 28 school administrators drawn from schools across both provinces. Participants were selected through maximum diversity sampling, an intentional strategy designed to capture as wide a range of perspectives and circumstances as possible rather than to produce a statistically representative sample. Data collection and analysis followed established interpretative phenomenological procedures, and the study received ethics approval from Ağrı İbrahim Çeçen University in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. The findings were then organized around three intersecting contexts that the authors identified as the main channels through which climate reaches the classroom: the sociocultural, the economic, and the educational.

The sociocultural channel proved to be among the most striking. In Ağrı, the long winter season reshapes the rhythm of social and family life, and with it the rhythm of schooling. Snow, ice, and extreme cold affect student attendance, complicate journeys to and from school, and restrict outdoor activity during breaks, a problem that connects to broader research showing that season and weather strongly influence physical activity levels. In Siirt, the equivalent disruption arrives with the heat. As air temperatures climb in late spring and summer, the study found that negative effects on educational practices intensified, echoing earlier work in Şanlıurfa, another hot Turkish province, which documented how climate characteristics affect the learning and teaching performance of secondary school students and teachers. In both cases, the climate does not merely make people uncomfortable; it restructures the social conditions under which education takes place.

The economic channel operates through family livelihoods and school resources. Seasonal agricultural labor, a well-documented feature of rural Turkey, pulls children out of school during certain periods of the year, and the timing of that labor is itself dictated by climate. Weather-dependent work patterns shape when families can afford to prioritize schooling and when economic necessity wins. At the institutional level, schools in both provinces were found to be vulnerable to climate impacts and, in the authors’ assessment, weak in terms of climate interaction, meaning that school buildings and routines had not been designed with regional climatic conditions in mind. This vulnerability was most severe in schools constructed without consideration of local climate, where problems multiplied.

The educational channel is the most direct. The study found that hot and cold weather conditions had a more negative impact on educational practices than cloudy, windy, or rainy conditions did. Extreme temperatures interfere with concentration, lesson pacing, the scheduling of the school year, and the physical usability of classrooms and schoolyards. In Ağrı, educational practices were more negatively affected overall, because the extended winter season prolongs exposure to disruptive cold. In Siirt, the damage was concentrated in the hottest months, when overheated classrooms undermine the very conditions learning requires. These findings align closely with the international quantitative literature: a meta-analytic review of temperature and performance found that both heat and cold degrade task performance, and studies of school buildings in cold climates, from Russia to China, have emphasized the importance of thermal design for educational quality.

What makes the study distinctive is its insistence that climate is not simply a background variable but an active participant in the social institution of education. The authors frame their work within ecological models of human development, in which children’s growth is understood as nested within overlapping environmental systems, from the family to the school to the broader culture and physical environment. Seen through this lens, a snowed-in road or an unventilated classroom is not an inconvenience at the margins of education; it is part of the ecological structure that determines what schooling can actually deliver. The research also resonates with historical evidence: an analysis of school logbooks from the Outer Hebrides of Scotland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries showed that extreme weather repeatedly disrupted schooling and exposed social vulnerabilities that persist in different forms today.

The policy implications are straightforward but consequential. The authors recommend that regional climatic conditions be taken into account when establishing educational programs and institutions, in order to safeguard the quality of education. In practice, that means school calendars that reflect local seasonal realities, building codes and architectural standards suited to cold or hot climates, investment in heating, insulation, and ventilation where they are most needed, and curricula and scheduling decisions that anticipate the disruptions that weather reliably brings. As climate change intensifies heat extremes and weather volatility across the globe, the study suggests that educational planners can no longer treat climate as a fixed given. The classrooms of the future, the research implies, will succeed or fail in part on how well societies learn to design education around the atmosphere that surrounds them.

Subject of Research: The interaction between regional climate conditions and educational practices in schools

Article Title: A sociological research regarding the interaction between educational practices and climate

Article References: Gürbüz, M., & Sever, M. (2026). A sociological research regarding the interaction between educational practices and climate. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 449. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01745-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01745-6

Keywords: climate, education, sociology of education, qualitative research, phenomenology, school buildings, heat exposure, cold climate, Turkey, student attendance, educational attainment, school policy

The new work, published in the open-access journal iScience, describes a low-frequency bidirectional pulsed current heating method that operates at frequencies of one hertz or below. The central innovation is adaptivity: rather than applying fixed pulse parameters, the system continuously adjusts the pulse currents according to the battery’s real-time state, ensuring that the anode potential never crosses the lithium-plating threshold throughout the entire heating process. The result, according to the authors, is the fastest possible heating that a given battery chemistry can safely tolerate, a genuine non-destructive approach validated on both lithium iron phosphate and nickel-cobalt-manganese cells.

To understand why this matters, it helps to consider the landscape of existing solutions. External heating methods, which rely on thermal fluids, heat pipes, or phase change materials placed outside the cell, tend to produce uneven temperature distributions and accelerate aging. Internal heating, by contrast, exploits the battery’s own internal resistance to generate Joule heat directly where it is needed, minimizing losses. Alternating current heating and mutual pulse heating, in which battery modules alternately charge and discharge one another, have both been explored extensively. Bidirectional pulsed current strategies, in which positive and negative pulses alternate to keep the state of charge nearly constant, have shown particular promise, but earlier high-frequency implementations demanded costly power electronics that limited real-world adoption.

The research team began by systematically mapping how pulse parameters influence heat generation. Using 2 ampere-hour LFP soft-pack cells placed in a temperature chamber, they varied the ratio of positive to negative pulse amplitudes from 1:1 up to 1:5 while holding the pulse period fixed at six seconds. Across both low and high states of charge, a larger amplitude ratio produced a greater temperature rise, a consequence of the fundamental relationship that heat generation scales with the square of current. They then varied the pulse period from fractions of a second up to 36 seconds and found that longer periods heated the battery more effectively, although the benefit plateaued beyond roughly ten seconds. That plateau defined their operating point: a ten-second pulse period, well within the low-frequency regime that avoids expensive high-frequency excitation hardware.

The truly distinctive element of the study is its use of three-electrode cells to police the lithium-plating boundary in real time. The researchers modified commercial cells by implanting a lithium titanate reference electrode at the center of the electrode stack, allowing them to measure the anode potential directly during operation, something impossible with conventional two-terminal cells. Through hybrid pulse power characterization tests conducted at temperatures from minus ten to twenty-five degrees Celsius and across a range of states of charge, they constructed a three-dimensional map of the maximum charging current the battery could tolerate at each condition without lithium deposition. This boundary current map became the adaptive brain of the heating algorithm, dictating the positive pulse amplitude as temperature and state of charge evolved.

The preheating experiments themselves were conducted under conditions mimicking a real electric vehicle arriving at a charger on a frigid winter day. With cells adjusted to ten percent state of charge and stabilized at minus fifteen degrees Celsius, the bidirectional pulses were applied. For the LFP cell, heating from minus fifteen to ten degrees took 2,068 seconds, an average temperature rise of 0.73 degrees Celsius per minute. Crucially, the measured anode potential, corrected against the reference electrode’s equilibrium potential of 1.565 volts versus lithium, remained above zero volts throughout the entire process, the electrochemical signature that no metallic lithium was plating onto the graphite anode at any moment.

Durability is where many preheating schemes have quietly failed, so the team subjected cells to one hundred repeated heating cycles at fixed state of charge. Because the bidirectional pulses deliver equal charge and discharge capacity within each cycle, the state of charge never drifts, allowing every cycle to begin from identical conditions. The authors note that with typical weekly charging and a three-month winter, one hundred heating cycles correspond to roughly seven years of real-world service, comparable to the lifetime of a traction battery. Capacity measurements taken before the test, after fifty cycles, and after one hundred cycles showed essentially no degradation. Post-mortem analysis sealed the case: transmission electron microscopy revealed an intact, uncracked SEI film, scanning electron microscopy showed an orderly lamellar electrode structure with no dendritic deposits, and energy-dispersive spectroscopy confirmed the elemental composition was unchanged.

To test whether the framework generalizes beyond one chemistry, the researchers repeated the entire procedure with a 1.75 ampere-hour commercial NCM811 pouch cell, independently recalibrating its lithium-plating boundary rather than simply copying LFP parameters. The results were striking. The NCM811 cell heated from minus fifteen to ten degrees in just 865.8 seconds, an average rise of 1.75 degrees Celsius per minute, nearly double the LFP rate. The reason lies in the interplay of resistance and allowable current: the NCM cell’s internal resistance is roughly half that of the LFP cell, but its lithium-plating boundary current is nearly twice as large, so its heating power, proportional to current squared times resistance, is consistently higher across all temperatures. The NCM cell likewise survived one hundred heating cycles with no measurable capacity loss and no lithium plating detected.

The physics underlying these results rewards aggressive current within safe limits. Because heat generation is proportional to the square of current, the alternating charge and discharge pulses of the bidirectional strategy allow larger amplitudes than constant-current heating would, since the alternating polarity alleviates anode polarization and prevents the anode potential from collapsing below zero volts. The authors point out an encouraging trend for the future: as battery technology improves fast-charging capability, the allowable lithium-plating boundary current grows, which in turn permits even larger pulse currents and faster heating, even as falling internal resistance reduces the Joule heating contribution per ampere.

The study is candid about its limitations. The pulse period was optimized at zero degrees and extrapolated to minus fifteen, an assumption supported but not exhaustively characterized across the full temperature range. The long-term stability of the implanted reference electrodes under repeated pulsing remains an open question, the durability test did not combine heating with subsequent fast charging, and the hardware costs and system-level energy efficiency of the required bidirectional power electronics were not quantified. Even so, the demonstration that a low-frequency, adaptive, chemistry-agnostic pulse strategy can warm frozen batteries at up to 1.75 degrees per minute without any detectable damage represents a meaningful step toward electric vehicles and stationary storage that shrug off winter. For the millions of drivers who watch their range evaporate on cold mornings, the prospect of a battery that heats itself safely and swiftly may be the most welcome news of the season.

Subject of Research: Non-destructive low-temperature pulse preheating of lithium-ion batteries

Article Title: Low-frequency non-destructive adaptive fastest pulse preheating for lithium-ion batteries

Article References: Li, C., Mao, S., Gao, M., He, M., Sun, Y., Wang, D., Han, X., Xia, C.-J., Wang, X., Lu, Y., & Gao, W. (2026). Low-frequency non-destructive adaptive fastest pulse preheating for lithium-ion batteries. iScience, 29(10), Article 117715. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2026.117715

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2026.117715

Keywords: lithium-ion batteries, preheating, bidirectional pulse current, lithium plating, cold climate, electric vehicles, anode potential, three-electrode cells, LFP, NCM811, fast charging, battery degradation