Lifeboat Foundation

Various forms of heat pumps—refrigerators, air conditioners, heaters—are estimated to consume about 30 percent of the world’s electricity. And that number is almost certain to rise, as heat pumps play a very large role in efforts to electrify heating to reduce the use of fossil fuels.

Most existing versions of these systems rely on the compression of a class of chemicals called hydrofluorocarbons, gasses that were chosen because they have a far smaller impact on the ozone layer than earlier refrigerants. Unfortunately, they are also extremely potent greenhouse gasses, with a short-term impact several thousand times that of carbon dioxide.

Alternate technologies have been tested, but all of them have at least one major drawback in comparison to gas compression. In a paper released in today’s issue of Science, however, researchers describe progress on a form of heat pump that is built around a capacitor that changes temperature as it’s charged and discharged. Because the energy spent while charging it can be used on discharge, the system has the potential to be highly efficient.

To enhance their catalytic efficiency in degrading organic pollutants, such as RB and urea, researchers further functionalized the surface of the micromotors with laccase, the bio-catalytic counterpart, for the generation of ammonia from urea. Urea is an emerging contaminant, being a common pollutant from residential activities (urea is the main component of urine) and from different industrial processes.

The chemical component laccase accelerates the conversion of urea into ammonia upon contact with contaminated water. This ammonia can be transformed into hydrogen, which is a clean and sustainable energy source.

“This is an interesting discovery. Today, water treatment plants have trouble breaking down all the urea, which can result in eutrophication when the water is released. This is a serious problem in urban areas in particular,” says Rebeca Ferrer, a PhD student from Dr. Katherine Villa’s group at ICIQ.

“The world isn’t doing terribly well in averting global ecological collapse,” says Dr. Florian Rabitz, a chief researcher at Kaunas University of Technology (KTU), Lithuania, the author of a new monograph, “Transformative Novel Technologies and Global Environmental Governance,” recently published by Cambridge University Press.

Greenhouse gas emissions, species extinction, ecosystem degradation, chemical pollution, and more are threatening the Earth’s future. Despite decades of international agreements and countless high-level summits, success in forestalling this existential crisis has remained elusive, says Dr. Rabitz.

In his new monograph, the KTU researcher delves into the intersection of cutting-edge technological solutions and the global environmental crisis. The author explores how international institutions respond (or fail to respond) to high-impact technologies that have been the subject of extensive debate and controversy.

Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier share the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for experiments that “have given humanity new tools for exploring the world of electrons inside atoms and molecules.” A more succinct description is that they have given us attosecond physics.

Attosecond physics is the science of the exceedingly, extremely, exceptionally [insert your own hyperbolic adverb here] fast. To put it into context, L’Huillier’s first call from the Nobel Prize’s Adam Smith after she received the news took 3 minutes 48 seconds, or-1 attoseconds. Her first heartbeat during that call lasted a second, or a billion billion attoseconds. Almost defying a description, an attosecond is an unfathomably tiny amount of time. But it happens to be the natural timescale of the near-instantaneous dance of electrons.

Continue reading “Nobel Prize in Phyiscs 2023” »

For the first time, researchers have succeeded in selectively exciting a molecule using a combination of two extreme-ultraviolet light sources and causing the molecule to dissociate while tracking it over time. This is another step towards specific quantum mechanical control of chemical reactions, which could enable new, previously unknown reaction channels.

The interaction of light with matter, especially with molecules, plays an important role in many areas of nature, for example in biological processes such as photosynthesis. Technologies such as solar cells use this process as well.

On the Earth’s surface, mainly light in the visible, ultraviolet or infrared regime plays a role here. Extreme-ultraviolet (XUV) light—radiation with significantly more energy than visible light —is absorbed by the atmosphere and therefore does not reach the Earth’s surface. However, this XUV radiation can be produced and used in the laboratory to enable a selective excitation of electrons in molecules.

Refractory organic pollutants, including phenols, perfluorinated compounds, and antibiotics, are abundant in various industrial wastewater streams such as chemical, pharmaceutical, coking, and dyeing sectors, as well as municipal and domestic sources. These pollutants pose significant threats to ecological well-being and human health.

The imperative to achieve complete removal of organic contaminants from water and facilitate water recycling is paramount for enhancing environmental quality and ensuring sustainable economic and social progress. Addressing the efficient removal of recalcitrant organic pollutants in water is not only a focal point in environmental chemical pollution control research but also a pivotal technical challenge constraining industrial wastewater reuse.

Advanced oxidation processes (AOPs), especially heterogeneous AOPs, yield strongly reactive oxygen species including ·OH, ·O₂^-, and ·SO₄^- to oxidize organic pollutants under ambient conditions, are appealing wastewater treatment technologies for decentralized systems. AOPs often need excessive energy input (UV light or electricity) to activate soluble oxidants (H₂O₂, O₃, persulfates), thus more cost-effective AOPs are urgently required.

Humankind on the verge of evolutionary traps, a new study: …For the first time, scientists have used the concept of evolutionary traps on human societies at large.

For the first time, scientists have used the concept of evolutionary traps on human societies at large. They find that humankind risks getting stuck in 14 evolutionary dead ends, ranging from global climate tipping points to misaligned artificial intelligence, chemical pollution, and accelerating infectious diseases.

The evolution of humankind has been an extraordinary success story. But the Anthropocene—the proposed geological epoch shaped by us humans—is showing more and more cracks. Multiple global crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, food insecurity, financial crises, and conflicts have started to occur simultaneously in something which scientists refer to as a polycrisis.

Continue reading “New research maps 14 potential evolutionary dead ends for humanity and ways to avoid them” »

On July 12, 2023, a new research paper was published in Aging, titled, “Chemically induced reprogramming to reverse cellular aging.”

BUFFALO, NY– July 12, 2023 – In a groundbreaking study, researchers have unlocked a new frontier in the fight against aging and age-related diseases. The study, conducted by a team of scientists at Harvard Medical School, has published the first chemical approach to reprogram cells to a younger state. Previously, this was only achievable using a powerful gene therapy.

On July 12, 2023, researchers Jae-Hyun Yang, Christopher A. Petty, Thomas Dixon-McDougall, Maria Vina Lopez, Alexander Tyshkovskiy, Sun Maybury-Lewis, Xiao Tian, Nabilah Ibrahim, Zhili Chen, Patrick T. Griffin, Matthew Arnold, Jien Li, Oswaldo A. Martinez, Alexander Behn, Ryan Rogers-Hammond, Suzanne Angeli, Vadim N. Gladyshev, and David A. Sinclair from Harvard Medical School, University of Maine and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) published a new research paper in Aging, titled, “Chemically induced reprogramming to reverse cellular aging.”

MIT researchers and colleagues have demonstrated a way to precisely control the size, composition, and other properties of nanoparticles key to the reactions involved in a variety of clean energy and environmental technologies. They did so by leveraging ion irradiation, a technique in which beams of charged particles bombard a material.

They went on to show that nanoparticles created this way have superior performance over their conventionally made counterparts.

“The materials we have worked on could advance several technologies, from fuel cells to generate CO₂-free electricity to the production of clean hydrogen feedstocks for the chemical industry [through electrolysis cells],” says Bilge Yildiz, leader of the work and a professor in MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Department of Materials Science and Engineering.