There’s a century-old adage coined by the paper industry that claims “you can make anything from lignin except a profit.”
Art Ragauskas has heard this maxim countless times during his career, and it gets him a little riled up every time he hears it. As the UT-ORNL Governor’s Chair for Biorefining, Ragauskas is channeling that ire into proving that the old saying’s time has come and gone.
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A team of scientists from the National University of Singapore (NUS) has developed a prototype device that mimics natural photosynthesis to produce ethylene gas using only sunlight, water and carbon dioxide. The novel method, which produces ethylene at room temperature and pressure using benign chemicals, could be scaled up to provide a more eco-friendly and sustainable alternative to the current method of ethylene production.
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Without countermeasures, climate change will negatively impact animals in pig and poultry production. Beside the health and wellbeing of the animals, heat stress also affects performance and, as a result, profitability. As the animals are predominantly kept in confined livestock buildings equipped with mechanical ventilation systems, researchers at Vetmeduni Vienna examined the inlet air temperature of several air cooling systems. The best solution, they found, is the use of the earth for heat storage via an earth-air heat exchanger (EAHE). An EAHE cools in the summer, and warms up the inlet air during wintertime.
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In 1982, when David Hasselhoff jumped into KITT, a super-advanced Pontiac Trans Am that could drive itself, it was obvious Knight Rider was pure TV science fiction. But nowadays, with companies investing millions in autonomous vehicle research, could KITT be just around the corner?
The technology behind self-driving cars is advancing at an incredible pace, with companies like General Motors, Google, Tesla and Uber testing cars in San Francisco, Phoenix and Boston. And the idea of robo-cars is very appealing to younger consumers, with nearly two-thirds of Millenials willing to own a self-driving vehicle within the next decade.
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The three most widely used neonicotinoid pesticides for flowering crops pose no risk to honeybee colonies when used correctly as seed treatments, according to new studies by University of Guelph researchers.
Amid mounting controversy over use of neonicotinoids (neonics) and declining bee populations, a new analysis by U of G scientists of previously unpublished studies and reports commissioned by agri-chemical companies Bayer and Syngenta – as well as published papers from the scientific literature – shows no significant ill effects on honeybee colonies from three common insecticides made by the companies.
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