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…)
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…)
Technique controls toxicity of ionic liquids, could lower cost by recycling key ingredient
Carbon dioxide has emerged as a new secret ingredient in the recipe for making ethanol, and that addition represents a major step forward in streamlining the biofuel production process. (more…)
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…)
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…)
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…)
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…)
Study shows three times more mercury in upper ocean since Industrial Revolution
Although the days of odd behavior among hat makers are a thing of the past, the dangers mercury poses to humans and the environment persist today.
Mercury is a naturally occurring element as well as a by-product of such distinctly human enterprises as burning coal and making cement. Estimates of “bioavailable” mercury—forms of the element that can be taken up by animals and humans—play an important role in everything from drafting an international treaty designed to protect humans and the environment from mercury emissions, to establishing public policies behind warnings about seafood consumption. (more…)
