A new conductor material and a new electrode material could pave the way for inexpensive batteries and therefore the large-scale storage of renewable energies.

Drop an electric motor into a ship and you’re all set to sail into a cleaner environment, right?

If only it were that simple, says a University of Victoria mechanical engineer whose research focuses on hybrid electric propulsion systems.

 Today, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), in partnership with DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the American Wind Energy Association, released the United States Wind Turbine Database (USWTDB) and the USWTDB Viewer to access this new public dataset.

The Collaborative Laboratories for Environmental Analysis and Remediation at The University of Texas at Arlington has expanded its partnership with oil field equipment supplier Challenger Water Solutions to develop water recycling technologies that will transform waste from unconventional oil and gas development into reusable water.

Of the four states of matter, gases are the hardest to pin down.  Gas molecules move quickly and wildly and don’t like to be confined. When confined, heat and pressure build in the container, and it doesn’t take long before the gas blows the lid off the place, literally. Luckily, gases are superficial. Provide them with an attractive internal surface area, and they’ll pin themselves down in no time. No, it’s not love at first sight, it’s adsorption.

Lithium-based batteries use more than 50 percent of all cobalt produced in the world. These batteries are in your cell phone, laptop and maybe even your car.

Teams of scientists from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) and the University of Warwick were able to observe the smallest details of hydrogen production with the synthetic mineral pentlandite. This makes it possible to develop strategies for the design of robust and cost-effective catalysts for hydrogen production. The working groups of Prof Dr Wolfgang Schuhmann and Dr Ulf-Peter Apfel from the RUB and the team headed by Prof Dr Patrick R. Unwin from the University of Warwick report in the journal Angewandte Chemie of 9 March 2018.

A team of engineers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) recently discovered that a naturally occurring bacterium, Thermoanaerobacterium thermosaccharolyticum TG57, isolated from waste generated after harvesting mushrooms, is capable of directly converting cellulose, a plant-based material, to biobutanol.

Solar energy dominated global investment in new power generation like never before in 2017. 

The cloud is coming back to Earth with a bump. That ethereal place where we store our data, stream our movies, and email the world has a physical presence – in hundreds of giant data centers that are taking a growing toll on the planet.