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Environmental News Network -- Know Your Environment
U.S. energy production could increase with the help of an improved carbon capture technology that use about half the energy of today's standard technologies. Emissions captured at fossil fuel power plants could in turn be used to harvest more crude by injecting it into underground oil fields.
Modern batteries power everything from cars to cell phones, but they are far from perfect – they catch fire, they perform poorly in cold weather and they have relatively short lifecycles, among other issues. Now researchers from the University of Houston have described a new class of material that addresses many of those concerns in Nature Materials.
The continent is considered to be a pristine wilderness compared to other regions and was thought to be relatively free from plastic pollution. However new findings by scientists from University of Hull and British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have revealed that recorded levels of microplastics are five times higher than you would expect to find from local sources such as research stations and ships.
Astronomers have released an image of a vast filament of star-forming gas, 1,200 light-years away, in the stellar nursery of the Orion Nebula.
The image shows ammonia molecules within a 50-light-year long filament detected through radio observations made with the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. It accompanies the first release of results from a research collaboration published in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement.
A team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has identified a nickel oxide compound as an unconventional but promising candidate material for high-temperature superconductivity.
The team successfully synthesized single crystals of a metallic trilayer nickelate compound, a feat the researchers believe to be a first.
"It's poised for superconductivity in a way not found in other nickel oxides. We're very hopeful that all we have to do now is find the right electron concentration."
The anxiety over antibiotic-resistant superbugs, which are responsible for 23,000 deaths a year in the United States, is likely to grow in California, following the recent discovery by UCLA researchers of high levels of antibiotic-resistant genes in parks in four cities.
Antibiotic-resistant genes, or ARGs, lead to antibiotic-resistant bacteria. And with antibiotic resistance rapidly increasing, worldwide they are expected to kill 10 million people annually by 2050 — more than cancer.
