News
Food waste could provide a cheaper way to pull CO2 from the air
2+ day, 6+ hour ago (859+ words) Making cheese leaves behind a cloudy, watery liquid that most producers pay to haul off. Tofu factories spill out their own protein-rich runoff, and the bulk of it is treated as waste. Materials scientists in Switzerland looked at that throwaway…...
Engineers have developed a jacket that captures and stores drinking water directly from the air
4+ day, 1+ hour ago (745+ words) The usual setup is a box on a rooftop, a panel in a yard, a damp bin in a corner, each a fixture you set up and leave running. This one has no box and no panel. You just wear…...
Water trapped inside tiny clay channels can store electrical charge, powering a new type of capacitor
1+ week, 3+ day ago (868+ words) Nobody puts water inside a charge-storage device on purpose. Every battery or supercapacitor is designed to keep it out " water corrodes electrodes, dilutes electrolytes, and generally wrecks performance. The working assumption is that water and stored electricity don't mix. That assumption,…...
Some bacteria can survive on light humans can barely see, and scientists mapped how they do it
1+ week, 5+ day ago (678+ words) Light past the deepest red a human eye can see was considered too weak to split water and power the chemistry of life. A small cluster of microbes does it anyway. Scientists have known these organisms existed for over a…...
Flat materials can bend light, and scientists just found the pattern hiding inside
1+ week, 6+ day ago (669+ words) When researchers program a flat sheet covered with millions of tiny light-bending structures " known as a metasurface " to steer light, something unexpected happens: its orderly grid seems to disappear. What began as a regular pattern turns into something nobody can…...
Scientists found a lower-heat way to make clean hydrogen from water
1+ week, 6+ day ago (866+ words) Hydrogen-powered buses already glide through a handful of cities, trailing nothing but water vapor. The fuel burns clean, no carbon, no soot. Making clean hydrogen from water is the hard part. Almost all the hydrogen we burn today comes from…...
Unhatched bird eggs reveal decades of hidden pollution
2+ week, 7+ hour ago (906+ words) Researchers tracking pollution in wildlife usually turn to living animals. Blood, feathers, and tissue samples can reveal which chemicals are moving through an ecosystem and where they are accumulating. A team in Spain found another source of evidence hidden in…...
A hidden enzyme in common bacteria may help make cleaner dyes and medicines
2+ week, 5+ day ago (845+ words) A bacterium that has spent decades in microbiology labs is not supposed to hold many surprises. Researchers generally assume its genes have been cataloged and its proteins assigned a purpose. That assumption failed in a common soil bacterium. One enzyme…...
Tiny ocean shells draw a hidden line across the Atlantic, and it may shape Earth's carbon cycle
2+ week, 6+ day ago (1042+ words) The ocean handles more of Earth's carbon chemistry than most people realize, and most of it happens invisibly. Somewhere between the surface and the seafloor, tiny armored cells live, calcify, and sink " taking carbon with them. Scientists have known for…...
Scientists design a new reactor that turns renewable electricity into a storable fuel
1+ mon, 1+ day ago (488+ words) Scientists have created a reactor capable of converting carbon dioxide into storable methane fuel using microbes and renewable energy....