• How much biomass grows in the savannah?

    Savannahs form one of the largest habitats in the world, covering around one-fifth of the Earth's land area. They are mainly to be found in sub-Saharan Africa. Savannahs are home not only to unique wildlife, including the 'Big Five' - the African elephant, rhinoceros, Cape buffalo, leopard and lion - but also to thousands of endemic plant species such as the baobab, or monkey bread tree.

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  • Newly engineered material can cool roofs, structures with zero energy consumption

    A team of University of Colorado Boulder engineers has developed a scalable manufactured metamaterial — an engineered material with extraordinary properties not found in nature — to act as a kind of air conditioning system for structures. It has the ability to cool objects even under direct sunlight with zero energy and water consumption.

    When applied to a surface, the metamaterial film cools the object underneath by efficiently reflecting incoming solar energy back into space while simultaneously allowing the surface to shed its own heat in the form of infrared thermal radiation.

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  • Long-lasting flow battery could run for more than a decade with minimum upkeep

    Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a new flow battery that stores energy in organic molecules dissolved in neutral pH water. This new chemistry allows for a non-toxic, non-corrosive battery with an exceptionally long lifetime and offers the potential to significantly decrease the costs of production.

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  • Wind Surpasses Hydroelectric as Top U.S. Renewable Energy Source

    For decades, hydroelectric dams served as the United States’ top source of renewable energy. But last year, wind power took the top spot, according to a new report by the American Wind Energy Association, an industry trade group. It is now the fourth largest source of energy in the U.S., behind natural gas, coal, and nuclear.

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  • Newly engineered material can cool roofs, structures with zero energy consumption

    A team of University of Colorado Boulder engineers has developed a scalable manufactured metamaterial — an engineered material with extraordinary properties not found in nature — to act as a kind of air conditioning system for structures. It has the ability to cool objects even under direct sunlight with zero energy and water consumption.

    >> Read the Full Article
  • Real-time feedback helps save energy and water

    Those who take long showers use a great deal of water and energy. Yet people who enjoy taking long showers do not usually realize to what extent they are damaging the environment. However, if a clever measuring system shows current consumption, this immediately leads to increased efficiency. The consumption information available on the display is incentive enough to reduce water and energy consumption when showering on average by 22 per cent. This was shown by a study conducted by the Universities of Bonn and Bamberg, as well as ETH Zurich. The results have initially been published online in the journal Management Science. The print edition will be published soon.

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  • Svalbard's electric power could come from hydrogen

    The energy supply to Longyearbyen, midway between continental Norway and the North Pole, is a hot topic in the climate debate.

    Longyearbyen is the largest settlement and the administrative centre of Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. Today, Longyearbyen obtains its electric power and district heating from its coal power plant, the only one in Norway.

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  • Recycling yogurt waste to produce electricity, nutrients and more dairy foods

    America’s appetite for Greek yogurt has skyrocketed over the past decade. But for every container of Greek yogurt consumed, you could fill two or three more with the acid whey it produces. The cover story in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, takes a look at the interesting ways scientists are making use of the byproduct.

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  • NREL Research Pinpoints Promise of Polycrystalline Perovskites

    A team of scientists from the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) determined that surface recombination limits the performance of polycrystalline perovskite solar cells.

    Considerable research into perovskites at NREL and elsewhere has proved the material's effectiveness at converting sunlight into electricity, routinely topping 20 percent efficiency. The sunlight creates mobile electrons whose movement generates the power but upon encountering defects can slip into a non-productive process. Known as a recombination, this process reduces the efficiency of a solar cell. For the cell to be the most efficient, the recombination must occur slowly.

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  • What Happened to the Sun over 7,000 Years Ago?

    An international team led by researchers at Nagoya University, along with US and Swiss colleagues, has identified a new type of solar event and dated it to the year 5480 BC; they did this by measuring carbon-14 levels in tree rings, which reflect the effects of cosmic radiation on the atmosphere at the time. They have also proposed causes of this event, thereby extending knowledge of how the sun behaves.

    When the activity of the sun changes, it has direct effects on the earth. For example, when the sun is relatively inactive, the amount of a type of carbon called carbon-14 increases in the earth's atmosphere. Because carbon in the air is absorbed by trees, carbon-14 levels in tree rings actually reflect solar activity and unusual solar events in the past. The team took advantage of such a phenomenon by analyzing a specimen from a bristlecone pine tree, a species that can live for thousands of years, to look back deep into the history of the sun.

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