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Archive for the ‘energy’ category: Page 11

Jan 12, 2024

Ask Ethan: Why doesn’t radiation dominate the Universe?

Posted by in categories: energy, space

For every proton, there were over a billion others that annihilated away with an antimatter counterpart. So where did all that energy go?

Jan 12, 2024

Researchers trap CO2 from air into nanofibers to prevent its release

Posted by in categories: chemistry, energy, sustainability

The two-step process also produces hydrogen gas as a by-product, which could also be used as a zero-emission fuel.


“We are looking at active sites and how these sites are bonding with the reaction intermediates,” said Ping Liu of Brookhaven’s Chemistry Division. “By determining the barriers, or transition states, from one step to another, we learn exactly how the catalyst is functioning during the reaction.”

The researchers found that the iron-cobalt alloy works sequentially in the second stage and gets pushed to the side as the nanofiber grows. Using this information, the team could leach the catalysts using acid and reuse them again. If the entire process could be fueled by renewable energy, the process would be a carbon-negative approach to CO2 mitigation.

Continue reading “Researchers trap CO2 from air into nanofibers to prevent its release” »

Jan 12, 2024

Researchers engineer world’s first yeast that harnesses energy from light

Posted by in category: energy

Georgia Tech researchers have engineered one of the world’s first yeast cells able to harness energy from light.


Scientists from Georgia Tech’s School of Biological Sciences have engineered one of the world’s first strains of yeast that may be happier with the lights on.

Jan 10, 2024

NASA Selects a Wild Plan to “Swarm” Proxima Centauri With Thousands of Tiny Probes

Posted by in categories: energy, space

Humans have dreamed about traveling to other star systems and setting foot on alien worlds for generations. To put it mildly, interstellar exploration is a very daunting task.

As Universe Today explored in a previous post, it would take between 19,000 and 81,000 years for a spacecraft to reach Proxima Centauri using conventional propulsion (or those that are feasible using current technology). On top of that, there are numerous risks when traveling through the interstellar medium (ISM), not all of which are well-understood.

Under the circumstances, gram-scale spacecraft that rely on directed-energy propulsion (AKA lasers) appear to be the only viable option for reaching neighboring stars in this century.

Jan 10, 2024

World’s first: Scientists aim to drill heart of volcano for unlimited power

Posted by in categories: energy, sustainability

Icelandic researchers and scientists are on a mission to transform the renewable energy landscape by delving into the heart of a volcano.

They have set their sights on revolutionizing renewable energy by exploring the possibilities of drilling directly into a volcano’s magma chamber. The magma chamber is an underground reservoir where molten rock collects before exploding as lava.

The ambitious Krafla Magma Testbed (KMT) project aims to tap into a magma chamber of Krafla in northern Iceland by 2026.

Jan 9, 2024

Solid-state battery design offers 6,000 cycles and 10-minute charge

Posted by in categories: energy, materials

The design solves dendrite-related issues by creating a multilayer battery with diverse materials and managing dendrites by containment.


Research unveils novel solid-state batteries with lithium metal anode and provides insights into revolutionary battery materials.

Jan 9, 2024

From indoor solar to light-based internet, photonics offers a brighter future

Posted by in categories: energy, internet

Soon, our devices will get power from the light around us and send information at incredible speeds while being safer and more efficient. Here’s a look at what’s new in photonics at CES 2024.

Jan 9, 2024

Scientists invent ultrathin optical crystal for next-generation laser tech

Posted by in categories: energy, physics

A team of Chinese researchers used a novel theory to invent a new type of ultrathin optical crystal with high energy efficiency, laying the foundation for next-generation laser technology.

Prof. Wang Enge from the School of Physics, Peking University, recently told Xinhua that the Twist Boron Nitride (TBN) made by the team, with a micron-level thickness, is the thinnest optical crystal currently known in the world. Compared with traditional crystals of the same thickness, its is raised by 100 to 10,000 times.

Wang, also an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said this achievement is an original innovation by China in the theory of optical crystals and has created a new field of making optical crystals with two-dimensional thin-film materials of light elements.

Jan 8, 2024

Eyeless cave-dwelling Leptonetela spiders still rely on light

Posted by in categories: energy, genetics

In this study, we conducted behavioral experiments and measured survival rates in local caves to minimize the impacts of factors other than light. Although energy-costly eyes were highly reduced or lost in cave-dwelling Leptonetela spiders, which spend their entire life cycles in the complete absence of light, our results demonstrated that they could detect light, and light cues may be used to avoid the perilously dry environment outside the cave. The annotation of core PPGs based on transcriptomic data suggests that cave-dwelling Leptonetela spiders have retained a nearly complete set of PPGs as in the entrance spiders. The molecular evolutionary analysis showed strong purifying selection on PPGs of cave-dwelling Leptonetela spiders. Therefore, our study provides evidence supporting the hypothesis that the phototransduction system of cave-dwelling eyeless Leptonetela spiders may have been under purifying selection rather than being a phylogenetic relic. Our results thus refute the neutral hypothesis.

Leptonetela spiders are small cryptozoic spiders that build sheet webs for capturing prey in twilight or lightless environment, such as leaf litter, rotting logs, rock crevices, and caves (31). Light is suggested to be the primary selective force driving the evolution of eyes of cave animals, thus, eyes are often reduced or lost as cave preadaptation in many litter-dwelling arthropods (3638). Leptonetela spiders have lost anterior median eyes that are generally involved in identifying and stalking prey in spiders, likely due to their twilight or lightless habitats. In addition, cave-dwelling Leptonetela spiders living in lightless deep caves exhibit various degrees of eye reduction (highly reduced or eyeless) compared to their entrance spider relatives that have six intact eyes. Thus, Leptonetela spiders provided an ideal system for studying the evolution of eyes and visual systems.

This study provides evidence demonstrating negative phototaxis in cave-dwelling spiders, a highly diverse group that plays a critical role in cave ecosystems as top predators (23). Negative phototaxis has frequently been found in other subterranean animals. For example, the cave-dwelling carrion beetle Ptomaphagus hirtus that has highly reduced eyes nonetheless displays strongly negative phototaxis and maintains a reduced but functional phototransduction system, as shown by transcriptomic data (13). However, Langille et al. (14) reported that five of six subterranean water beetles completely lacked phototactic responses, and the authors proposed negative phototaxis as a preadaptation to living in permanent darkness for ancestral cave-dwelling animals. We speculate that drought resistance may play an important role in the retention of PPGs in Leptonetela spiders.

Jan 7, 2024

World’s first tunnel to a magma chamber could unleash unlimited energy

Posted by in category: energy

In Iceland, scientists are planning to drill two boreholes to a reservoir of liquid rock. One will give us our first direct measurements of magma – the other could supercharge geothermal power.

By Graham Lawton

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