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A key tool in the fight against atmospheric carbon just got a big boost, with scientists finding a way to significantly speed up the process of locking away carbon in water or rocks – known as carbon sequestration.
Sequestration involves some complex chemical reactions, and the new research demonstrates a way of speeding up one specific part of those reactions, making it up to 500 times faster and removing a potential bottleneck in the overall process. This could be a huge boost in how quickly we can deal with our warming planet.
If a garden hose were possessed by a demon, it might look like this. A new tube robot can unravel at 35 kilometres per hour to a maximum length of 72 metres, changing direction at whim. It even has the ability to turn handles.
Unlike most robots and animals, plants move by growing. It’s a slow process, but a growing plant can easily get round corners or into tight spaces.
The new robot does the same thing, only faster. It has up to three chambers that, when filled with air, force extra material to unfold. By controlling the airflow in each chamber, the robot can change direction.
Cornell University chemists have uncovered a fresh role for nitric oxide that could send biochemical textbooks back for revision.
They have identified a critical step in the nitrification process, which is partly responsible for agricultural emissions of harmful nitrous oxide and its chemical cousins into the atmosphere, contributing to global climate change.
Current biochemical models hold that inorganic hydroxylamine is the only intermediary formed when bacteria convert ammonia - used in commercial agricultural fertilizer - into dormant nitrite. In this new study, the chemists found that hydroxylamine is converted into another intermediary - nitric oxide - which under normal soil conditions acts as the chemical prelude to nitrite. But under imperfect soil conditions, nitric oxide is converted into the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide. The work was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 17.
Mass production of plastics, which began just six decades ago, has accelerated so rapidly that it has created 8.3 billion metric tons—most of it in disposable products that end up as trash. If that seems like an incomprehensible quantity, it is. Even the scientists who set out to conduct the world’s first tally of how much plastic has been produced, discarded, burned or put in landfills, were horrified by the sheer size of the numbers.
“We all knew there was a rapid and extreme increase in plastic production from 1950 until now, but actually quantifying the cumulative number for all plastic ever made was quite shocking,” says Jenna Jambeck, a University of Georgia environmental engineer who specializes in studying plastic waste in the oceans.
Giant squids, which roam the deep sea and grow bodies large enough to spoon a school bus, are the stuff of legend. Their rare visits to the ocean’s surface may have inspired the kraken of Norse mythology and the beasts in Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.”
Among the creature’s biggest claims to fame are its eyes — along with another species of squid, giant squids have the largest orbs in the animal kingdom. But the sophistication of the giant squid’s visual brain may not be commensurate with its basketball-sized peepers, according to a paper published Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
It’s a technicolour dreamcoat for your crisp packet – a strong, flame-retardant and airtight new material that mimics mother of pearl.
The natural version, also called nacre, is found on the inner shell of some molluscs, where it is built up of layers of the mineral aragonite separated by organic polymers such as chitin. It is remarkably strong, without being brittle or dense.
We would like to use nacre and similar materials as a protective coating in many situations. However, making them is a slow and delicate process that is difficult to recreate at any useful scale. Artificial nacre-like materials are usually painstakingly built up layer by layer, but Luyi Sun at the University of Connecticut in Storrs and his colleagues found a way to do it all in one go.
The ancestral wolves that evolved into domestic dogs may have carried genetic mutations that made them socialise more readily with people. What’s more, the same genes cause excessive sociability in humans.
It was already known that even if wolves have been raised with humans from birth, they never become as close to people or look at them as often as dogs tend to.