A new study from the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) establishes a novel catalytic method to produce renewable acrylonitrile using 3-hydroxypropionic acid (3-HP), which can be biologically produced from sugars. This hybrid biological-catalytic process offers an alternative to the conventional petrochemical production method and achieves unprecedented acrylonitrile yields.

Zilin Jiang from Technion — Israel Institute of Technology and Alexandr Polyanskii from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) have proved László Fejes Tóth’s zone conjecture. Formulated in 1973, it says that if a unit sphere is completely covered by several zones, their combined width is at least π. The proof, published in the journal Geometric and Functional Analysis, is important for discrete geometry and enables new problems to be formulated.

New research at the University of Waterloo could lead to the development of batteries that triple the range of electric vehicles.

The breakthrough involves the use of negative electrodes made of lithium metal, a material with the potential to dramatically increase battery storage capacity.

“This will mean cheap, safe, long-lasting batteries that give people much more range in their electric vehicles,” said Quanquan Pang, who led the research while he was a PhD candidate in chemistry at Waterloo.

The increased storage capacity, or energy density, could boost the distance electric vehicles are able to travel on a single charge, from about 200 kilometres to 600 kilometres.

The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory’s Marine Meteorology Division in Monterey, California, houses a team of scientists and engineers who work in conjunction with the lab’s broader scientific community to provide the fleet with the most accurate weather forecasts possible.

The federally endangered bird, the snail kite, was faced with an interesting dilemma: The island apple snail was good to eat, but about two to five times bigger than the native snail that the bird usually consumed. What’s a hungry bird to do? Evolve – quickly.

A study by a team of University of Florida researchers has found that in about 10 years, the snail kite has evolved to develop a larger beak as its new prey, the island apple snail, proliferated and became invasive. The study is published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

The rapidly growing wind energy industry may be challenged by changes in locations of wind resources

Humans have been altering natural waterways for centuries, but only in the last several decades have dams raised ecological concerns.

N. LeRoy Poff, professor of biology at Colorado State University, studies the ecological impact to rivers from human-caused changes, such as dam building, and how these modified river systems can be managed for resilience.

The shape of our neurons may indicate our brains actually employ a type of learning, dubbed “deep learning,” that was developed to drive artificial intelligence, or AI, applications, a University of Toronto researcher has found.

Canola oil is one of the most widely consumed vegetable oils in the world, yet surprisingly little is known about its effects on health. Now, a new study published online December 7 in the journal Scientific Reports by researchers at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University (LKSOM) associates the consumption of canola oil in the diet with worsened memory, worsened learning ability and weight gain in mice which model Alzheimer’s disease. The study is the first to suggest that canola oil is more harmful than healthful for the brain.

It took several years, but a research team headed by Professor Jens Nielsen at Chalmers University of Technology has finally succeeded in mapping out the complex metabolism of yeast cells. The breakthrough, recently published in an article in Nature Communications, means a huge step forward in the potential to more efficiently produce protein therapies for diseases such as cancer.