CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new study by economists at Oregon State University questions the cost-effectiveness of biofuels and says they would barely reduce fossil fuel use and would likely increase greenhouse gas emissions.
The idea that biofuels can reduce dependency on fossil fuels and mitigate climate change has led governments to promote them as substitutes for gasoline and petroleum-based diesel, using mandates and subsidies, said Bill Jaeger, the lead author on the study.
A milestone has been reached on the road to developing advanced biofuels that can replace gasoline, diesel and jet fuels with a domestically-produced clean, green, renewable alternative.
Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have engineered the first strains of Escherichia coli bacteria that can digest switchgrass biomass and synthesize its sugars into all three of those transportation fuels. What's more, the microbes are able to do this without any help from enzyme additives.
For Immediate Release – November 29, 2011 – (Toronto) – Fewer Ontario teens are smoking cigarettes than ever before -- good news that is tempered by continuing concerns around binge drinking, and driving while under the influence of cannabis, according to the 2011 Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey released today by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). The survey, which included 9,288 students across Ontario in grades 7 to 12, is the longest running student survey in Canada.
One of the first tasks for Warwick's new £1.3 million super computer is to use its monster megabytes to analyse the natural properties of the tiny mollusc shell.
The humble mollusc shell is made up of only one mineral: calcium carbonate, yet the combination of that plus other enzymes and proteins give it remarkable properties in terms of strength while remaining incredibly light.
Although they found that graphene makes very good chemical sensors, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have discovered an unexpected "twist"—that the sensors are better when the graphene is "worse"—more imperfections improved performance.
"This is quite the opposite of what you would want for transistors, for example," explained Eric Pop, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and a member of the interdisciplinary research team. "Finding that the less perfect they were, the better they worked, was counter intuitive at first."
CHICAGO – Newly developed computer software combined with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of a fetus may help physicians better assess a woman's potential for a difficult childbirth. Results of a study using the new software were presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).
CORVALLIS, Ore. – Pyrite, better known as "fool's gold," was familiar to the ancient Romans and has fooled prospectors for centuries – but has now helped researchers at Oregon State University discover related compounds that offer new, cheap and promising options for solar energy.
These new compounds, unlike some solar cell materials made from rare, expensive or toxic elements, would be benign and could be processed from some of the most abundant elements on Earth. Findings on them have been published in Advanced Energy Materials, a professional journal.
Zanzibar, Tanzania – Researchers at Aalto University in Finland have designed a network proxy that can cut the power consumption of 3G smart phones up to 74 percent. This device enhances performance and significantly reduces power usage by serving as a middleman for mobile devices to connect to the Internet and handling the majority of the data transfer for the smart phone. Historically, the high energy requirements of mobile phones have slowed the adoption of mobile Internet services in developing countries.
How to improve the performance of the plasma actuators is a problem that is of great interest to many scientific researchers in the field of electrohydrodynamics. Professor WANG Lianze and his group from the School of Aerospace, Tsinghua University, set out to investigate this problem. They developed novel plasma actuators using various winding-shaped electrodes to create plasma actuators which induce three-dimensional variations in the shear layer, offering significant flexibility in flow control.
What will a day in the life of a Californian be like in 40 years? If the state cuts its greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 — a target mandated by a state executive order — a person could wake up in a net-zero energy home, commute to work in a battery-powered car, work in an office with smart windows and solar panels, then return home and plug in her car to a carbon-free grid.
ARLINGTON, Va.— The History Channel will feature an Office of Naval Research (ONR)-sponsored device that could help Sailors and Marines scale walls like Batman during its "Modern Marvels" show Nov. 28.
Funded by ONR's TechSolutions program, the Powered Rope Ascender was originally designed for use by soldiers in urban combat and cave exploration. The handheld climbing tool allows warfighters to ascend and descend vertical surfaces quickly, at a rate of six feet per second.
The sun doesn't always shine and the breeze doesn't always blow and therein lie perhaps the biggest hurdles to making wind and solar power usable on a grand scale. If only there were an efficient, durable, high-power, rechargeable battery we could use to store large quantities of excess power generated on windy or sunny days until we needed it. And as long as we're fantasizing, let's imagine the battery is cheap to build, too.
Now Stanford researchers have developed part of that dream battery, a new electrode that employs crystalline nanoparticles of a copper compound.
Washington, D.C. — The composition of the Earth's core remains a mystery. Scientists know that the liquid outer core consists mainly of iron, but it is believed that small amounts of some other elements are present as well. Oxygen is the most abundant element in the planet, so it is not unreasonable to expect oxygen might be one of the dominant "light elements" in the core. However, new research from a team including Carnegie's Yingwei Fei shows that oxygen does not have a major presence in the outer core.
A team of university researchers, aided by scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), have succeeded in integrating a new, highly efficient piezoelectric material into a silicon microelectromechanical system (MEMS).* This development could lead to significant advances in sensing, imaging and energy harvesting.
Led by a group at the University of Maryland (UMd), a multi-institution team of researchers has combined modern materials research and an age-old metallurgy technique to produce an alloy that could be the basis for a new class of sensors and micromechanical devices controlled by magnetism.* The alloy, a combination of cobalt and iron, is notable, among other things, for not using rare-earth elements to achieve its properties.