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  1. #101
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    nanotech engineering. BigOil

    Major Advance in Artificial Photosynthesis Poses Win/Win for the Environment

    A potentially game-changing breakthrough in artificial photosynthesis has been achieved with the development of a system that can capture carbon dioxide emissions before they are vented into the atmosphere and then, powered by solar energy, convert that carbon dioxide into valuable chemical products, including biodegradable plastics, pharmaceutical drugs and even liquid fuels.

    Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have created a hybrid system of semiconducting nanowires and bacteria that mimics the natural photosynthetic process by which plants use the energy in sunlight to synthesize carbohydrates from carbon dioxide and water. However, this new artificial photosynthetic system synthesizes the combination of carbon dioxide and water into acetate, the most common building block today for biosynthesis.

    “We believe our system is a revolutionary leap forward in the field of artificial photosynthesis,” says Peidong Yang, a chemist with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and one of the leaders of this study. “Our system has the potential to fundamentally change the chemical and oil industry in that we can produce chemicals and fuels in a totally renewable way, rather than extracting them from deep below the ground.”


    Yang, who also holds appointments with UC Berkeley and the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Ins ute (Kavli-ENSI) at Berkeley, is one of three corresponding authors of a paper describing this research in the journal Nano Letters. The paper is led “Nanowire-bacteria hybrids for unassisted solar carbon dioxide fixation to value-added chemicals.” The other corresponding authors and leaders of this research are chemists Christopher Chang and Mic e Chang. Both also hold joint appointments with Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley. In addition, Chris Chang is a Howard Hughes Medical Ins ute (HHMI) investigator. (See below for a full list of the paper’s authors.)


    The more carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere the warmer the atmosphere becomes. Atmospheric carbon dioxide is now at its highest level in at least three million years, primarily as a result of the burning of fossil fuels. Yet fossil fuels, especially coal, will remain a significant source of energy to meet human needs for the foreseeable future. Technologies for sequestering carbon before it escapes into the atmosphere are being pursued but all require the captured carbon to be stored, a requirement that comes with its own environmental challenges.


    The artificial photosynthetic technique developed by the Berkeley researchers solves the storage problem by putting the captured carbon dioxide to good use.


    “In natural photosynthesis, leaves harvest solar energy and carbon dioxide is reduced and combined with water for the synthesis of molecular products that form biomass,” says Chris Chang, an expert in catalysts for carbon-neutral energy conversions. “In our system, nanowires harvest solar energy and deliver electrons to bacteria, where carbon dioxide is reduced and combined with water for the synthesis of a variety of targeted, value-added chemical products.”


    By combining biocompatible light-capturing nanowire arrays with select bacterial populations, the new artificial photosynthesis system offers a win/win situation for the environment: solar-powered green chemistry using sequestered carbon dioxide.


    “Our system represents an emerging alliance between the fields of materials sciences and biology, where opportunities to make new functional devices can mix and match components of each discipline,” says Mic e Chang, an expert in biosynthesis.

    “For example, the morphology of the nanowire array protects the bacteria like Easter eggs buried in tall grass so that these usually-oxygen sensitive organisms can survive in environmental carbon-dioxide sources such as flue gases.”


    The system starts with an “artificial forest” of nanowire heterostructures, consisting of silicon and anium oxide nanowires, developed earlier by Yang and his research group.

    “Our artificial forest is similar to the chloroplasts in green plants,” Yang says. “When sunlight is absorbed, photo-excited electron−hole pairs are generated in the silicon and anium oxide nanowires, which absorb different regions of the solar spectrum. The photo-generated electrons in the silicon will be passed onto bacteria for the CO2 reduction while the photo-generated holes in the anium oxide split water molecules to make oxygen.”

    Once the forest of nanowire arrays is established, it is populated with microbial populations that produce enzymes known to selectively catalyze the reduction of carbon dioxide. For this study, the Berkeley team used Sporomusa ovata, an anaerobic bacterium that readily accepts electrons directly from the surrounding environment and uses them to reduce carbon dioxide.


    S. ovata is a great carbon dioxide catalyst as it makes acetate, a versatile chemical intermediate that can be used to manufacture a diverse array of useful chemicals,” says Mic e Chang. “We were able to uniformly populate our nanowire array with S. ovata using buffered brackish water with trace vitamins as the only organic component.”


    Once the carbon dioxide has been reduced by S. ovata to acetate (or some other biosynthetic intermediate), genetically engineered E.coli are used to synthesize targeted chemical products. To improve the yields of targeted chemical products, the S. ovata and E.coli were kept separate for this study. In the future, these two activities – catalyzing and synthesizing – could be combined into a single step process.


    A key to the success of their artificial photosynthesis system is the separation of the demanding requirements for light-capture efficiency and catalytic activity that is made possible by the nanowire/bacteria hybrid technology. With this approach, the Berkeley team achieved a solar energy conversion efficiency of up to 0.38-percent for about 200 hours under simulated sunlight, which is about the same as that of a leaf.


    The yields of target chemical molecules produced from the acetate were also encouraging – as high as 26-percent for butanol, a fuel comparable to gasoline, 25-percent for amorphadiene, a precursor to the antimaleria drug artemisinin, and 52-percent for the renewable and biodegradable plastic PHB. Improved performances are anticipated with further refinements of the technology.


    “We are currently working on our second generation system which has a solar-to-chemical conversion efficiency of three-percent,” Yang says. “Once we can reach a conversion efficiency of 10-percent in a cost effective manner, the technology should be commercially viable.”


    In addition to the corresponding authors, other co-authors of the Nano Letters paper describing this research were Chong Liu, Joseph Gallagher, Kelsey Sakimoto and Eva Nichols.


    This research was primarily funded by the DOE Office of Science.

    http://scienceblog.com/77856/major-a...JeXS2hAzty8.99

  2. #102
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    fuel from seawater:

    Navy researchers at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), Materials Science and Technology Division, demonstrate proof-of-concept of novel NRL technologies developed for the recovery of carbon dioxide (CO2) and hydrogen (H2) from seawater and conversion to a liquid hydrocarbon fuel.



    Flying a radio-controlled replica of the historic WWII P-51 Mustang red-tail aircraft—of the legendary Tuskegee Airmen—NRL researchers (l to r) Dr. Jeffrey Baldwin, Dr. Dennis Hardy, Dr. Heather Willauer, and Dr. David Drab (crouched), successfully demonstrate a novel liquid hydrocarbon fuel to power the aircraft's unmodified two-stroke internal combustion engine. The test provides proof-of-concept for an NRL developed process to extract carbon dioxide (CO2) and produce hydrogen gas (H2) from seawater, subsequently catalytically converting the CO2 and H2 into fuel by a gas-to-liquids process.

    Using an innovative and proprietary NRL electrolytic cation exchange module (E-CEM), both dissolved and bound CO2 are removed from seawater at 92 percent efficiency by re-equilibrating carbonate and bicarbonate to CO2 and simultaneously producing H2. The gases are then converted to liquid hydrocarbons by a metal catalyst in a reactor system.

    "In close collaboration with the Office of Naval Research P38 Naval Reserve program, NRL has developed a game changing technology for extracting, simultaneously, CO2 and H2 from seawater," said Dr. Heather Willauer, NRL research chemist. "This is the first time technology of this nature has been demonstrated with the potential for transition, from the laboratory, to full-scale commercial implementation."
    - See more at: http://www.nrl.navy.mil/media/news-r....ecdiJcgU.dpuf

  3. #103
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  4. #104
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    frontline cure for malaria:

    Update: Tu Youyou has been awarded a share of the 2015 Nobel Prize for medicine or physiology for her discovery of artemisinin. She shared the prize with William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura, whose work led to the development of ivermectin, an important treatment for roundworm parasite diseases.



    FORTY years ago a secret military project in communist China yielded one of the greatest drug discoveries in modern medicine. Artemisinin remains the most effective treatment for malaria today and has saved millions of lives. Until recently, though, the drug’s origins were a mystery.


    “I was at a meeting in Shanghai in 2005 with all of the Chinese malariologists and I asked who discovered artemisinin,” says Louis Miller, a malaria researcher at the US National Ins utes of Health in Rockville, Maryland. “I was shocked that no one knew.”


    Miller and his NIH colleage Xinzhuan Su began digging into the drug’s history. After reviewing letters, researchers’ original notebooks and transcripts from once-secret meetings, they concluded the major credit should go to pharmacologist Tu Youyou. Two months ago Tu received America’s top medical accolade, the Lasker award.
    https://www.newscientist.com/article...ria-for-china/

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  6. #106
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  7. #107
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    Not a discovery, but ...

    The bizarre reactor that might save nuclear fusion





    http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2...nuclear-fusion

  8. #108
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    nano-reactor for hydrogen biofuel?

    http://news.indiana.edu/releases/iu/...-reactor.shtml

  9. #109
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    Researchers continue work on producing hydrogen, and car mfrs haven't given up on FCVs

  10. #110
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    Tiny Machine Paddles Water, Eats Pollution, Spits Out Electricity


    Inside these tiny machines is a colony of hungry bacteria, yearning to eat. The row-bot, as this charming little device is named, paddles about on the surface of water, funneling waste and pollution into its bacteria-rich stomach and receiving electrical power in return. It’s a self-sufficient cleaner on a tiny scale, made to bob in the sea and eat tiny bites of waste until there’s nothing left.

    Presented last month at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in Hamburg, Germany, the paper “Row-bot: An Energetically Autonomous Artificial Water Boatman” by a team of academic researchers in Bristol, details the design and development of the tiny garbage-eating machines. The initial goal was to create a machine that could forage, like a wild animal, so it wasn’t dependent on humans to constantly recharge and reenergize itself. Inspired also by the water boatman insect, the robot they created is a tiny, hungry, buoyant surface skimmer.

    For flotation, the machine has four little stabilizers. To move, there are two paddles in the middle of its body, which have flexible flipper joints to make sure they move efficiently and minimize drag. Powering the row-bot is a bacteria-filled fuel cell. In the cell, bacteria digest organic waste, and produce carbon dioxide as a by-product, as well as the protons and electrons needed to get the electrical circuit in the cell flowing. In this design, the row-bot generated more energy than it needed to keep refueling itself. That’s huge, and it means in the future, the answer to waste in the water might be sprinkling robots into the stream, and waiting until they eat all the garbage.
    http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/techno...UX&ocid=HPCDHP

  11. #111
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    low cost, non-corrosive flow batteries?

    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.




    The research, published in ACS Energy Letters, was led by Michael Aziz, the Gene and Tracy Sykes Professor of Materials and Energy Technologies and Roy Gordon, the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Materials Science.


    Flow batteries store energy in liquid solutions in external tanks—the bigger the tanks, the more energy they store. Flow batteries are a promising storage solution for renewable, intermittent energy like wind and solar but today's flow batteries often suffer degraded energy storage capacity after many charge-discharge cycles, requiring periodic maintenance of the electrolyte to restore the capacity.


    By modifying the structures of molecules used in the positive and negative electrolyte solutions, and making them water soluble, the Harvard team was able to engineer a battery that loses only one percent of its capacity per 1000 cycles.
    https://techxplore.com/news/2017-02-...um-upkeep.html

  12. #112
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    Not really a discovery, more of an improvement

    StimDust is the smallest deep-tissue stimulator that we are aware of that's capable of stimulating almost all of the major therapeutic targets in the peripheral nervous system,
    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180410161038.htm

  13. #113
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    water out of "thin air":

    It started out modestly enough: David Hertz, having learned that under the right conditions you really can make your own water out of thin air, put a little contraption on the roof of his office and began cranking out free bottles of H2O for anyone who wanted one.

    Soon he and his wife, Laura Doss-Hertz, were thinking bigger—so much so that this week the couple won the $1.5 million XPrize For Water Abundance. They prevailed by developing a system that uses shipping containers, wood chips and other detritus to produce as much as 528 gallons (2,000 liters) of water a day at a cost of no more than 2 cents a quart (1 liter).
    https://techxplore.com/news/2018-10-...le-device.html

  14. #114
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    New catalyst efficiently produces hydrogen from seawater
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    New catalyst efficiently produces hydrogen from seawater
    November 11, 2019 by Jeannie Kever, University of Houston
    New catalyst efficiently produces hydrogen from seawater
    Zhifeng Ren, director of the Texas Center for Superconductivity at UH and M.D. Anderson Chair Professor of physics, said the new catalyst allows researchers to avoid many of the obstacles that have stymied the widespread use of seawater to produce hydrogen. Credit: University of Houston
    Seawater is one of the most abundant resources on earth, offering promise both as a source of hydrogen—desirable as a source of clean energy—and of drinking water in arid climates. But even as water-splitting technologies capable of producing hydrogen from freshwater have become more effective, seawater has remained a challenge.


    Researchers from the University of Houston have reported a significant breakthrough with a new oxygen evolution reaction catalyst that, combined with a hydrogen evolution reaction catalyst, achieved current densities capable of supporting industrial demands while requiring relatively low voltage to start seawater electrolysis.

    Researchers say the device, composed of inexpensive non-noble metal nitrides, manages to avoid many of the obstacles that have limited earlier attempts to inexpensively produce hydrogen or safe drinking water from seawater. The work is described in Nature Communications
    https://m.phys.org/news/2019-11-cata...-seawater.html

  15. #115
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    boson sampling for quantum computing

    A team of researchers affiliated with several ins utions in China has built and tested a photonic quantum computer that demonstrates quantum supremacy. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their computer, which they call Jiuzhang, and how well it performed while conducting Gaussian boson sampling.

    Quantum computers have been in the news lately as scientists try to determine if they can meet expectations. Quantum computers could vastly outperform conventional machines on certain tasks. The goal is to achieve what has come to be known as" quantum supremacy"—where a quantum computer can outperform conventional computers on at least one type of task. Until now, only one computer has ever achieved this feat—Google's Sycamore device. And because the field is still so new, researchers around the world are working on vastly different designs. Sycamore was based on qubits represented by superconducting materials. In this new effort, the team in China has developed a photon-based quantum computer capable of carrying out a single specific type of calculation—boson sampling.

    Boson sampling is a means for calculating the output of a straight-line optical circuit that has multiple inputs and outputs. It is carried out by constructing a machine in which photons are sent into a circuit in parallel, and once inside, are split by beam splitters. The split photons continue through the circuit, encountering mirrors and other beam splitters. Notably, if two photons happen to encounter the same splitter simultaneously, both unsplit photons will follow one of the paths away from the splitter. The process is repeated, resulting in a distribution of numbers that represent the network output. Conventional computers become bogged down very quickly when trying to calculate distributions of such a system. Jiuzhang was built to handle 100 inputs and 100 outputs using 300 beam splitters and 75 mirrors.

    The researchers found that it took Jiuzhang approximately 200 seconds to provide an answer. They noted that it would have taken the world's fastest supercomputer approximately 2.5 billion years to carry out the same calculations—a clear example of quantum supremacy.
    https://phys.org/news/2020-12-chines...supremacy.html

    https://science.sciencemag.org/conte...cience.abe8770

  16. #116
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  17. #117
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    CO2 into starch


    scientists at the Tianjin Ins ute of Industrial Biotechnology (TIB) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) designed a chemoenzymatic system as well as an artificial starch anabolic route consisting of only 11 core reactions to convert CO2 into starch.
    This route was established by a "building block" strategy, in which the researchers integrated chemical and biological catalytic modules to utilize high-density energy and high-concentration CO2 in a biotechnologically innovative way.

    The researchers systematically optimized this hybrid system using spatial and temporal segregation by addressing issues such as substrate compe ion, product inhibition, and thermodynamical adaptation.

    The artificial route can produce starch from CO2 with an efficiency 8.5-fold higher than starch biosynthesis in maize, suggesting a big step towards going beyond nature. It provides a new scientific basis for creating biological systems with unprecedented functions.

    "According to the current technical parameters, the annual production of starch in a one-cubic-meter bioreactor theoretically equates with the starch annual yield from growing 1/3 hectare of maize without considering the energy input," said Cai Tao, lead author of the study.
    This work would open a window for industrial manufacturing of starch from CO2.
    https://phys.org/news/2021-09-chinese-scientists-starch-synthesis-carbon.html

  18. #118
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    Not a discovery, but a reported breakthrough

    Chinese scientists are claiming to have built the world’s fastest programmable quantum computers, which appear to crack problems that are currently not possible for ”classical” non-quantum computers.


    The researchers, led by Pan Jianwei from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), say the Zuchongzhi 2.1, which takes its name from a historical 5th century Chinese mathematician- -astronomer and engineer, is a 66-qubit programmable superconducting quantum computer.

    It is reportedly 10 million times faster than the world’s current fastest supercomputer.

    Moreover, it can even handle calculations that are 100 times more complex than what Google’s Sycamore can handle.

    On the other hand, Jiuzhang 2.0 is a photonic quantum computer prototype.

    With 113 detected photons, it outperforms the original Jiuzhang supercomputer that had just 76.

    This upgrade reportedly helps it perform Gaussian Boson Sampling a septillion times faster than the current fastest supercomputer.

    This marks the first time any country has achieved this advantage in two different routes.
    I like that the article lists its sources, I wish more journalists would do that:

    The quantum study was published online in the journal Physical Review Letters and Science Bulletin.
    Sources: The Independent, AA.com, Fossbytes.com, Varindia.com, People’s Daily Online, Chinese Academy of Sciences, DesignTaxi.com, APS Physics, Global Times
    https://asiatimes.com/2021/10/ustc-r...-breakthrough/

  19. #119
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    more of a tech breakthrough

    powdered iron as a fuel source

    By the end of June, a large 1-megawatt plant that burns iron fuel will fire up, producing the heat needed to brew beer at the Swinkels brewery near Eindhoven, Netherlands, in a test lasting for several months. The plant, named IRON+, is a joint venture between three companies and built on technology first demonstrated as a 100-kilowatt system in 2020 by the Metal Power Consortium, which includes the Eindhoven University of Technology and startup Metalot, which was spun out of the university.


    The high melting points of metals make them useful components for machinery, electronics, and furnaces. But even metals can burn if you grind them into fine powders. What’s more, metals can burn without emitting toxic or planet-warming emissions, making them a potentially attractive fuel for producing clean power—one that can be easily stored and transported.



    RIFT (Renewable Iron Fuel Technology), another spinoff out of Eindhoven, recently demonstrated that it could heat five homes using its iron fuel technology. In Canada, meanwhile, startup Altiro Energy, launched by McGill University researchers, has run a prototype 10-kW iron fuel plant that they now plan to scale up.




    Demonstration plants like this one are showing the possibility of iron as a fuel. EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY

    Iron powder is an ideal alternative to carbon fuels, says Jeff Bergthorson, a mechanical engineering professor at McGill and the chief scientific advisor for Altiro. Bergthorson and colleagues at the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency developed the metal fuel concept and published their report in the journal Applied Energy in 2015.


    Iron is one of the most abundant metals on Earth, and the most produced. It has an energy density of about 11.3 kilowatt-hours per liter—better than gasoline. Burning iron powder produces heat that can be used directly or converted into electricity by a steam turbine, leaving behind iron oxide, or rust. This can later be reduced—that is, the oxygen can be stripped away—back into iron powder. “You can think of iron fuel as a clean, recyclable coal,” says Bergthorson.
    https://spectrum.ieee.org/iron-fuel

  20. #120
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    Physical Review Letters retracts room temperature superconductivity articles by Ranga Dias.

    For David Muller, a physicist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, the cir stances surrounding Dias’s retractions and thesis reminds him of a series of retractions made two decades ago, after researcher Jan Hendrik Schön at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, was discovered to have falsified data. In Schön’s case, and in his own experience, Muller says, “people who fake data tend not to do it just once”.
    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02401-2

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