Tag Archives: carbon dioxide

The truth about cats’ and dogs’ environmental impact

UCLA researcher finds that feeding pets creates the equivalent of 64 million tons of carbon dioxide a year

With many Americans choosing to eat less meat in recent years, often to help reduce the environmental effect of meat production, UCLA geography professor Gregory Okin began to wonder how much feeding pets contributes to issues like climate change. (more…)

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Invention produces cleaner water with less energy and no filter

The same technology that adds fizz to soda can now be used to remove particles from dirty water. Researchers at Princeton University have found a technique for using carbon dioxide in a low-cost water treatment system that eliminates the need for costly and complex filters. (more…)

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Cyclotron Road Leads Energy Entrepreneurs Across the Innovation Gap

New Berkeley Lab program seeks scientists to commercialize the next breakthrough technology.

Steven Kaye got his Ph.D. working on metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), one of the most exciting materials in chemistry today and especially effective for separating gases. But nearly a decade after earning his degree, he saw that the science-to-product gap was still gaping: despite the discovery of thousands of MOFs, there was not a single MOF material in commercial use. (more…)

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River Buries Permafrost Carbon at Sea

New study traces the fate of carbon stored in thawing Arctic soils

As temperatures rise, some of the organic carbon stored in Arctic permafrost meets an unexpected fate—burial at sea. As many as 2.2 million metric tons of organic carbon per year are swept along by a single river system into Arctic Ocean sediment, according to a new study an international team of researchers published in Nature. This process locks away carbon dioxide (CO2) – a greenhouse gas – and helps stabilize the earth’s CO2 levels over time, and it may help scientists better predict how the natural carbon cycle will interplay with the surge of CO2 emissions due to human activities. (more…)

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Hydrogen fuel: Inexpensive, efficient bi-metallic electrocatalysts may open floodgates for hydrogen fuel

University of Delaware researchers have discovered a cheap and efficient catalyst for converting water to hydrogen fuel (known as hydrogen evolution), a vital step in making hydrogen a viable and sustainable energy source.

“The rising concerns about carbon dioxide emissions have led to a growing realization that it is not possible to sustain the world’s current development without a substitution of clean and renewable energy,” writes Feng Jiao, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and a co-author on the paper published in the current issue of Nature Communications. “Hydrogen is a potential clean fuel for our society.”  (more…)

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Meteorite That Doomed Dinosaurs Remade Forests

The impact decimated slow-growing evergreens and made way for fast-growing, deciduous plants, UA researchers say, and that provides an explanation for those fall colors.

The meteorite impact that spelled doom for the dinosaurs 66 million years ago decimated the evergreens among the flowering plants to a much greater extent than their deciduous peers, according to a study led by UA researchers. The results are published in the journal PLoS Biology. (more…)

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NASA: Alaska Shows No Signs of Rising Arctic Methane

Despite large temperature increases in Alaska in recent decades, a new analysis of NASA airborne data finds that methane is not being released from Alaskan soils into the atmosphere at unusually high rates, as recent modeling and experimental studies have suggested. The new result shows that the changes in this part of the Arctic have not yet had enough impact to affect the global methane budget. (more…)

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