The amount of carbon in the atmosphere is growing day by day and scientists and entrepreneurs are exploring ways to take it out, from planting more trees to making giant filters to suck carbon out of the air and pump it into underground rock formations. Perhaps the most cost-effective way is Brilliant Planet’s plan to...
Category: TRENDS IN HI-TECH SCIENCE
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CALLING ON ALPACAS, NOT DRUGS, TO TAMP DOWN CHRONIC INFLAMMATION
Science has shown that chronic inflammation underlies a range of human conditions from arthritis and gout to age-related degeneration and Alzheimer’s Disease. Now researchers at universities in Germany and Brazil think the solution to inflammation may lie with alpacas, the wooly critters that look like llamas, only smaller. The group was studying something called ASC...
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NEW PROCESSES “MINE” METALS FROM WATER, FUEL FROM SEWAGE
Nations are scrambling for ways to source more cobalt, lithium, nickel, oil, and other minerals without having to depend on foreign sources. Now the U.S. energy department’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has an answer. The lab is grabbing metals from wastewater by adding magnetized iron nanoparticles covered by a chemical shell that snags lithium...
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U.S. DEFENSE DEPARTMENT WILL BUILD SMALL, MOBILE NUCLEAR PLANT
The U.S. defense department’s Idaho National Laboratory will build and test a mobile nuclear power plant, capable of turning out as much as five megawatts of power for up to three years, the department has announced. The “Project Pele” microreactor will be the first next-generation nuke plant build in the U.S. Defense installations are power-hungry,...
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NEW SOLID-STATE HEAT ENGINE MORE POWERFUL THAN STEAM TURBINE
Humanity makes most of its electricity from heat that boils water to make steam to drive turbines. However, the typical turbine uses only about 35 percent of that heat energy; the rest is wasted. Also, turbines’ moving parts degrade at temperatures above about 3,600°F, or about 2,000°C. MIT has overcome both limitations by making an...
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WILL THIS NEW FUSION TECHNOLOGY FINALLY WORK?
For half a century, scientists—and tens of billions of research dollars—have been chasing the dream of “hot fusion,” the idea of mashing hydrogen atoms together to release vast amounts of clean energy. For almost all of that time, research has focused on heating a gaseous mix of charged atomic particles to temperatures higher than the...
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U.K. RESEARCHERS DE-AGE CELLS BY 30 YEARS
It sounds like bad clickbait, but a team of British biologists has found a way to reverse the symptoms of aging in skin cells by about 30 years, according to their research published this month in the online journal eLife. De-aging is old news; over the last decade, researchers have reprogrammed human and rodent cell...
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NEW LIQUID STORES SOLAR ENERGY FOR YEARS
Solar power is greener than conventional electric power and now almost as cheap. But sunshine isn’t reliable. Thanks to an innovation from Sweden’s Chalmers Institute of Technology, it doesn’t need to be. The researchers have created a novel molecule of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen. When sunlight hits the molecule, it rearranges its atoms in a...
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CHIP AUTOMATES CREATION OF NEW CELLS
Imagine your hand has been crushed in an accident. The blood vessels are damaged. Not enough blood is getting to your fingers. You could lose them. To save your hand, scientists can take cells from your body—skin cells, for example—and “devolve” them back into stem cells, the embryonic “blank slates” that then can be biochemically...
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SULFUR: THE NEXT BIG THING IN EV BATTERIES?
The formula for typical EV battery cathodes—the terminal where the electric current flows out to spin a motor—is known as NMC811, because the cathode is 80 percent nickel, 10 percent manganese, and 10 percent cobalt. German start-up Theion’s new EV battery cathode could be called S100 because it’s all sulfur—the fifth most common element on...
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