Lifeboat Foundation

A relatively new kind of semiconductor, layered atop a mirror-like structure, can mimic the way that leaves move energy from the sun over relatively long distances before using it to fuel chemical reactions. The approach may one day improve the efficiency of solar cells.

“Energy transport is one of the crucial steps for solar energy harvesting and conversion in solar cells,” said Bin Liu, a postdoctoral researcher in electrical and computer engineering and first author of the study in the journal Optica.

“We created a structure that can support hybrid light-matter mixture states, enabling efficient and exceptionally long-range energy transport.”

Hydrogen (H 2) is currently discussed as an ideal energy carrier in a world requiring renewable energies. Hydrogen has the highest gravimetric energy density of all chemical fuels (141 MJ/kg), which is three times higher than gasoline (46 MJ/kg). However, its low volumetric density restricts its widespread use in transportation applications —as current storage options require a lot of space.

At ambient temperature, hydrogen is a gas, and one kilogram of hydrogen occupies a volume of 12,000 liters (12 cubic meters). In fuel-cell vehicles, hydrogen is stored under a very high pressure of 700 times the atmospheric pressure, which reduces the volume to 25 liters per kilogram of H 2.

Liquid hydrogen shows a higher density resulting in 14 liters per kilogram, but it requires extremely low temperatures since the boiling point of hydrogen is minus 253 °C.

With gas prices soaring and food costs pinching family budgets, an interdisciplinary team of researchers at WPI is looking at ways to use food waste to make a renewable and more affordable fuel replacement for oil-based diesel. The work, led by Chemical Engineering Professor Michael Timko, is detailed in a new paper in the journal iScience.

“By creating a biodiesel through this method, we’ve shown that we can bring the price of gas down to $1.10 per gallon, and potentially even lower,” said Timko.

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that, in 2018 in the United States, about 81% of household food—about 20 tons—ended up in landfills or combustion facilities. Food waste is also a major contributor to climate change: once it’s placed in landfills, it emits methane, a greenhouse gas.

Squeaky, cloudy or spherical—electron orbitals show where and how electrons move around atomic nuclei and molecules. In modern chemistry and physics, they have proven to be a useful model for quantum mechanical description and prediction of chemical reactions. Only if the orbitals match in space and energy can they be combined—this is what happens when two substances react with each other chemically. In addition, there is another condition that must be met, as researchers at Forschungszentrum Jülich and the University of Graz have now discovered: The course of chemical reactions also appears to be dependent on the orbital distribution in momentum space. The results were published in the journal Nature Communications.

Chemical reactions are ultimately nothing more than the formation and breakdown of electron bonds, which can also be described as orbitals. The so-called molecular orbital theory thus makes it possible to predict the path of chemical reactions. Chemists Kenichi Fukui and Roald Hoffmann received the Nobel Prize in 1981 for greatly simplifying the method, which led to its widespread use and application.

“Usually, the energy and location of electrons are analyzed. However, using the photoemission tomography method, we looked at the momentum distribution of the orbitals,” explains Dr. Serguei Soubatch. Together with his colleagues at the Peter Grünberg Institute (PGI-3) in Jülich and the University of Graz in Austria, he adsorbed various types of molecules on metal surfaces in a series of experiments and mapped the measured momentum in the so-called momentum space.

Now, as a new generation of nuclear reactor designers develop advanced molten salt reactor concepts as an alternative for providing reliable, sustainable, carbon-free power, the need for radiation chemistry has never been greater.

To meet that need, Idaho National Laboratory’s Center for Radiation Chemistry Research has developed a capability that supports the nuclear energy industry by researching radiation-induced effects in advanced reactors, fuels, coolants, materials and fuel recycling technologies while also training the next generation of radiation chemists.

AN UNDERWATER city of unique, upward-reaching rocks and chemical reactions has scientists wondering if they’ve found the answer to how life begins.

The Lost City Hydrothermal Field is situated in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

The Lost City is affixed on top of an underwater mountain and spreads out over 5,000 square feet.

In recent years, electronics and chemical engineers have devised different chemical doping techniques to control the sign and concentration of charge carriers in different material samples. Chemical doping methods essentially entail introducing impurities into materials or substances to change their electrical properties.

These promising methods have been successfully applied on several materials including van der Waals (vdW) materials. VdW materials are structures characterized by strongly bonded 2D layers, which are bound in the third dimension through weaker dispersion forces.

Researchers at University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), the Kavli Energy Nanosciences Institute, Beijing Institute of Technology, Shenzhen University, Tsinghua University recently introduced a new tunable and reversible approach to chemically dope graphene. Their approach, introduced in a paper published in Nature Electronics, is based on laser-assisted chlorination.

Experiments suggest that metabolism could have begun spontaneously on our primordial planet—and that scientists may need to rethink how we define life.

Dr. Joscha Bach is VP of Research at AI Foundation and Author of Principles of Synthetic Intelligence, focused on how our minds work, and how to build machines that can perceive, think, and learn.

http://bach.ai.
Twitter ► https://twitter.com/Plinz.
LinkedIn ► https://linkedin.com/in/joschabach.

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