Author Archives: Science News Releases

Amazonian highway is bad for the climate and hardly helps the economy

Paving a highway across South America is providing lessons on the impact of road construction elsewhere.

That’s what a University of Florida researcher and his international colleagues have determined from analyzing communities along the Amazonian portion of the nearly 4,200-mile Interoceanic Highway, a coast-to-coast road that starts at ports in Brazil and will eventually connect to ones in Peru.

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Zeolites can reduce carbon capture energy costs by 30 per cent

Zeolite structure

In this zeolite structure, the arrangement of oxygen atoms (red) and silicon atoms (tan) influences the regions in the pores (colored surface) where CO2 can be captured.

A detailed analysis of more than 4 million absorbent minerals has determined that new materials could help electricity producers slash as much as 30 percent of the “parasitic energy” costs associated with removing carbon dioxide from power plant emissions.

The research by scientists at Rice University, the University of California, Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) was published online this week in the journal Nature Materials (“In silico screening of carbon-capture materials”).

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Injecting various drugs without needles made possible by new device

Needleless hypodermic deviceGetting a shot at the doctor’s office may become less painful in the not-too-distant future.

MIT researchers have engineered a device that delivers a tiny, high-pressure jet of medicine through the skin without the use of a hypodermic needle. The device can be programmed to deliver a range of doses to various depths — an improvement over similar jet-injection systems that are now commercially available.

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Disturbence of long ecological chains: how planting palm trees can affect manta rays

Palm tree on beachDouglas McCauley and Paul DeSalles did not set out to discover one of the longest ecological interaction chains ever documented. But that’s exactly what they and a team of researchers — all current or former Stanford students and faculty — did in a new study published in Scientific Reports.

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Solar energy to be beamed to Earth from space

Solar cellsSolar power gathered in space could be set to provide the renewable energy of the future thanks to innovative research being carried out by engineers at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.

Researchers at the University have already tested equipment in space that would provide a platform for solar panels to collect the energy and allow it to be transferred back to earth through microwaves or lasers.

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Safe way to store hydrogen to be developed for use in cars and it’s even cheaper than petrol

The European Technology Initiative, “Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking” (FCH JU), is providing approx 2.3 million euro of finance for the development of new hydrogen solid-state containers on the basis of boron hydrides.These compounds absorb much more hydrogen, the tanks remain compact.The Bor4Store project is being coordinated by the Institute of Material Research at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht.

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New portable measuring tool enables accurate determination of airborne nanoparticle size and distribution

Companies cannot protect workers from nanoparticle exposure unless first they can determine there is a potential problem. To date, the size and cost of existing nanoparticle size measurement instrumentation has been an impediment to routine industrial measurements.

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Natural sulfur aerosol emissions provide support for Gaia hypothesis

Is Earth really a sort of giant living organism as the Gaia hypothesis predicts? A new discovery made at the University of Maryland may provide a key to answering this question. This key of sulfur could allow scientists to unlock heretofore hidden interactions between ocean organisms, atmosphere, and land — interactions that might provide evidence supporting this famous theory.

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Scientists present multi-model warming forecast for North American regions

For the first time, researchers have been able to combine different climate models using spatial statistics – to project future seasonal temperature changes in regions across North America.

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