The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday proposed increasing the amount of ethanol and other biofuels that must be blended into the nation's fuel supplies over the next three years, a move welcomed by renewable fuel and farm groups but condemned by environmentalists and oil industry groups.
Renewable energy technologies such as wind turbines and solar panels are gaining traction, but are sometimes met with local resistance because they take up valuable space that could otherwise be used for agricultural production.
From cartoon memes to cancel culture, hashtag activism and "new" languages, it's undeniable that Black Twitter has shaped much of today's internet culture.
Warehouses are home to heavy volumes of traffic. The numbers of industrial trucks (pallet trucks, forklift vehicles and the like) traversing their aisles are growing especially large—in facilities that are themselves increasing in size all the time. Under these conditions, accidents become an inevitability even if numerous safety measures are put in place.
The increase in tourism and the proliferation of holiday rental platforms offering apartments, houses and rooms have completely changed the tourism landscape, particularly in large urban destinations. Taken together, these circumstances have become a major challenge for local government in cities like Barcelona. This is primarily because of the conflicts that they can create among the city's residents, and because of the issue of how the various types of tourist accommodation are regulated.
Rather than being released into the atmosphere and exacerbating the problem of climate change, CO2 can also be used as a raw material for substances required in industrial processes, such as formic acid or methanol. The conversion of CO2 has already been investigated in detail in laboratory studies, with nanodiamonds serving as an environmentally friendly photocatalyst. Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Microengineering and Microsystems IMM are now working with partners to turn this reaction into a continuous process—bringing it much closer to real-world application.
Producing infection control clothing requires a lot of energy and uses lots of material resources. Fraunhofer researchers have now developed a technology which helps to save materials and energy when producing nonwovens. A digital twin controls key manufacturing process parameters on the basis of mathematical modeling.
Energy is scarce—and like all scarce things, it comes at a price. That is why Germany needs to greatly reduce its energy consumption. There is significant potential for this in the area of heating and cooling energy which accounts for a large proportion of Germany's energy consumption. Innovative materials that can be programmed to control heat transition can be a valuable tool in this scenario. The use of materials like these could, for instance, save up to 40% of the energy used to cool single-family homes.
Electronic health records (EHRs) need a new public relations manager. Ten years ago, the U.S. government passed a law that required hospitals to digitize their health records with the intent of improving and streamlining care. The enormous amount of information in these now-digital records could be used to answer very specific questions beyond the scope of clinical trials: What's the right dose of this medication for patients with this height and weight? What about patients with a specific genomic profile?
Miniature satellites known as CubeSats are taking on larger roles in space missions that might previously have been carried out by more expensive conventional spacecraft. Now, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are envisioning a still larger mission for CubeSats as airborne testbeds for technologies that are being developed for future generations of hypersonic vehicles.
Microscale electrochemical energy storage systems with high systemic performance, superior cell number density, tunable capacitance, and output voltage are promising for miniaturized electronics.
More than 750,000 steel silos and bins are estimated to pepper rural America, often standing empty before filling up on the annual harvest. The modest cylinders typically feature thin, corrugated walls that belie the importance of storing and drying the grains within.
To meet U.S. goals of a 100% carbon-free electric grid by 2035, the wind energy workforce must keep pace with industry growth. This means closing its workforce gap. Now, two new reports from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) explore the reasons behind the wind energy workforce gap and suggest solutions for closing it.
Chemists and engineers have been trying to create increasingly efficient, affordable and stable battery technologies to power a wide range of electronic devices. To do this, they have been leveraging the multi-redox reactions of materials that are highly abundant on Earth, such as iron and manganese, which could help to lower battery fabrication costs.
Engineers at Caltech have developed a method for 3D printing pure and multicomponent metals, at a resolution that is, in some cases, an order of magnitude smaller than previously possible. The process, which uses water-based chemistry and 3D printing, was described in a paper published in Nature on October 20.
In May 2022, the TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) payload onboard a small CubeSat satellite was launched into orbit 300 miles above Earth's surface. Since then, TBIRD has delivered terabytes of data at record-breaking rates of up to 100 gigabits per second—100 times faster than the fastest internet speeds in most cities—via an optical communication link to a ground-based receiver in California.
If you are reading this article on your computer or phone, it is in part thanks to diodes. Diodes—typically rigid electrical components that easily conduct electric current in one direction—are used for a variety of critical electronic functions, from converting AC to DC and converting energy from mechanical to electrical to serving as a switch component that enables digital displays and more. Electronic devices, such as robotics or medical devices, are becoming more flexible as technology advances, so Penn State researchers have developed a fully rubbery stretchable diode that maintains performance.
A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in China has developed a type of electrolysis that works with native seawater and does not have side-reactions or corrosion problems. In their study, published in the journal Nature, the group tested their process in a real-world location. Heping Xie, with Shenzhen University, has published a Research Briefing in the same journal issue outlining this new effort.
Chinese researchers have designed a gas-liquid two-phase flow-based triboelectric nanogenerator (GL-TENG) with ultrahigh output power, according to a research article recently published in Science Advances.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk said on Wednesday one of his companies would in six months be able to implant a device into a human brain that would allow communication with a computer.
Controlling microscopic processes is inherently challenging. The everyday tools we use to manipulate matter on the macroscale can't simply be shrunk down to the size of cell, and even if they could, the physical forces they rely on work differently when their targets are measured in nanometers.
The Utah Bionic Leg, a motorized prosthetic for lower-limb amputees developed by University of Utah mechanical engineering associate professor Tommaso Lenzi and his students in the HGN Lab, is on the cover of the newest issue of Science Robotics.
Soft robots, or those made with materials like rubber, gels and cloth, have advantages over their harder, heavier counterparts, especially when it comes to tasks that require direct human interaction. Robots that could safely and gently help people with limited mobility grocery shop, prepare meals, get dressed, or even walk would undoubtedly be life-changing.
The hackers leaking stolen Australian health records to the dark web on Thursday appeared to end their extortion attempt by dumping a final batch of data online and declaring:"Case closed."
