Copper-based catalysts efficiently turn carbon dioxide into methane

Soumyabrata Roy is a Rice University postdoctoral research associate in materials science and nanoengineering and the study’s lead author.
Photo Credit: Gustavo Raskosky/Rice University

Technologies for removing carbon from the atmosphere keep improving, but solutions for what to do with the carbon once it’s captured are harder to come by.

The lab of Rice University materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan and collaborators developed a way to wrest the carbon from carbon dioxide and affix it to hydrogen atoms, forming methane ⎯ a valuable fuel and industrial feedstock. According to the study published in Advanced Materials, the method relies on electrolysis and catalysts developed by grafting isolated copper atoms on two-dimensional polymer templates.

“Electricity-driven carbon dioxide conversion can produce a large array of industrial fuels and feedstocks via different pathways,” said Soumyabrata Roy, a research scientist in the Ajayan lab and the study’s lead author. “However, carbon dioxide-to-methane conversion involves an eight-step pathway that raises significant challenges for selective and energy-efficient methane production.

“Overcoming such issues can help close the artificial carbon cycle at meaningful scales, and the development of efficient and affordable catalysts is a key step toward achieving this goal.”

Could seaweed hold the key to the fountain of youth?

Photo Credit: Kindel Media

Scientists from Flinders University have discovered rich anti-aging properties in South Australian brown seaweed that significantly increase collagen levels in the skin and protect against the deterioration of both collagen and elastin.

“We found that extracts from South Australian brown seaweed have huge potential to be used to help slow the effects of aging on our skin,” says Professor Wei Zhang, College of Medicine and Public Health.

“Collagen acts as a building block for bones, teeth, muscles, skin, joints and connective tissue, while elastin gives skin its elasticity and strength – and both these proteins are popularly promoted by the beauty industry as essential for the appearance of healthy skin,” he says.

Professor Zhang explains the Flinders team has found that extracts from SA’s brown seaweed not only stimulated the growth of collagen, but also inhibited a process called glycation, which leads to the deterioration of collagen and elastin.

“So far anti-glycation agents haven’t been strong enough to have a major impact on anti-aging, so our discovery is really exciting as we can see the potential to develop stronger anti-glycation extracts from brown seaweed.”

Fighting Climate Change Isn’t an Automatic Win for Environmental Justice

Photo Credit: SD-Pictures

Some simulated pathways for reducing emissions in the U.S. maintained or exacerbated existing racial inequities

In the United States in 2017, people of color were exposed to 10% more particulate matter air pollution compared to white people. This well-documented inequity has been baked into the fabric of American life by racist housing policies like redlining and has left a legacy of negative health outcomes for communities of color across the nation.

The kind of sweeping cuts to greenhouse gas emissions needed to fight climate change are expected to improve air quality because burning fossil fuels also produces air pollution. But a new study from researchers at the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and School of Global Policy and Strategy shows that while reducing greenhouse gases will likely improve overall air quality, reducing emissions could maintain or even exacerbate environmental inequality.

The study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and supported by the National Science Foundation as well as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, used computer models to simulate more than 300 paths to reduce emissions that all achieved the U.S. Paris Climate Agreement goal of a 50-52% net greenhouse gas emissions reduction from 2005 levels by 2030. While all the simulated paths to reducing emissions improved overall air quality, some actually widened the air quality gap between people of color and white people in the U.S.

“These disparities can go up or down depending on how you implement climate policy,” said climate scientist Pascal Polonik, 2023 Scripps PhD graduate and lead author of the study. “It’s not a given that any climate policy that succeeds in reducing emissions also succeeds when it comes to environmental justice.”

Screening in zebrafish identifies a drug to potentially improve recovery from spinal cord injury

Zebra fish
Photo Credit: © Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden / Technische Universität Dresden

Scientists from the Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden (CRTD) at TUD Dresden University of Technology, the University of Edinburgh, and the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre in Montreal, investigated potential drugs to improve recovery from spinal cord injury. After testing over a thousand molecules, they identified cimetidine, an existing drug, to improve spinal repair in zebrafish and mice. Their work uncovers a promising route to new treatments and highlights the potential of zebrafish to screen for molecules that aid in spinal repair. The work was published in the journal Theranostics.

Sudden impacts to the spinal cord, such as those caused by a car accident, can cause lifelong injuries. The healing of an injury can be prolonged or even prevented by inflammation caused by an overreaction of the body’s immune system. Reducing inflammation with existing anti-inflammatory drugs suppresses the immune response as a whole, inhibiting the immune cells that are beneficial and promote injury repair.

In a new study, scientists from the Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden (CRTD) at TUD Dresden University of Technology, the University of Edinburgh, and the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre tested more than a thousand drugs in zebrafish larvae for their ability to prevent excessive inflammation during an immune response. Through this screening process, the research team identified an existing drug – cimetidine – that improved spinal cord repair in zebrafish.

Brain receptor patterns separate sensory and cognitive networks

Receptor patterns define key organizational principles in the brain, scientists have discovered.
Photo Credit: Pete Linforth

An international team of researchers, studying macaque brains, have mapped out neurotransmitter receptors, revealing a potential role in distinguishing internal thoughts and emotions from those generated by external influences.

The comprehensive dataset has been made publicly available, serving as a bridge linking different scales of neuroscience - from the microscopic to the whole brain.

Lead author Sean Froudist-Walsh, from the University of Bristol’s Department of Computer Science explained: “Imagine the brain as a city. In recent years, brain research has been focused on studying its roads, but in this research, we've made the most detailed map yet of the traffic lights - the neurotransmitter receptors - that control information flow.

“We've discovered patterns in how these 'traffic lights' are arranged that help us understand their function in perception, memory, and emotion.

“It's like finding the key to a city's traffic flow, and it opens up exciting possibilities for understanding how the normal brain works.

“Potentially in the future, other researchers may use these maps to target particular brain networks and functions with new medicines.

Clean, sustainable fuels made ‘from thin air’ and plastic waste

Carbon capture from air and its photoelectrochemical conversion into fuel with simultaneous waste plastic conversion into chemicals. 
Photo Credit: Ariffin Mohamad Annuar

Researchers have demonstrated how carbon dioxide can be captured from industrial processes – or even directly from the air – and transformed into clean, sustainable fuels using just the energy from the sun.

The researchers from the University of Cambridge developed a solar-powered reactor that converts captured CO2 and plastic waste into sustainable fuels and other valuable chemical products. In tests, CO2 was converted into syngas, a key building block for sustainable liquid fuels, and plastic bottles were converted into glycolic acid, which is widely used in the cosmetics industry.

Unlike earlier tests of their solar fuels technology however, the team took CO2 from real-world sources – such as industrial exhaust or the air itself. The researchers were able to capture and concentrate the CO2 and convert it into sustainable fuel.

Although improvements are needed before this technology can be used at an industrial scale, the results, reported in the journal Joule, represent another important step toward the production of clean fuels to power the economy, without the need for environmentally destructive oil and gas extraction.

GE Aerospace runs one of the world’s largest supercomputer simulations to test revolutionary new open fan engine architecture

CFM’s RISE open fan engine architecture.
Image Credit: GE Aerospace

To support the development of a revolutionary new open fan engine architecture for the future of flight, GE Aerospace has run simulations using the world’s fastest supercomputer capable of crunching data in excess of exascale speed, or more than a quintillion calculations per second.

To model engine performance and noise levels, GE Aerospace created software capable of operating on Frontier, a recently commissioned supercomputer at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory with processing power of about 37,000 GPUs. For comparison, Frontier’s processing speed is so powerful, it would take every person on Earth combined more than four years to do what the supercomputer can in one second.  

By coupling GE Aerospace’s computational fluid dynamics software with Frontier, GE was able to simulate air movement of a full-scale open fan design with incredible detail.

“Developing game-changing new aircraft engines requires game-changing technical capabilities. With supercomputing, GE Aerospace engineers are redefining the future of flight and solving problems that would have previously been impossible,” said Mohamed Ali, vice president and general manager of engineering for GE Aerospace.

“Predatory bacteria” provide hope for chlorine-free drinking water

The inside of a water pipe
Photo Credit: Krisjtan Pullerits / Lund University

In a unique study carried out in drinking water pipes in Sweden, researchers from Lund University and the local water company tested what would happen if chlorine was omitted from drinking water. The result? An increase in bacteria, of course, but after a while something surprising happened: a harmless predatory bacteria grew in numbers and ate most of the other bacteria. The study suggests that chlorine is not always needed if the filtration is efficient - and that predatory bacteria could perhaps be used to purify water in the future.

Just as human intestines contain a rich bacterial flora, many types of bacteria thrive in our drinking water and the pipes that transport them. On the inside of pipe walls is a thin, slippery coating, called a biofilm, which protects and supports bacteria. These bacteria have adapted to life in the presence of chlorine, which otherwise has the primary task to kill bacteria, particularity bacteria that can make humans sick.  

An ordinary glass of drinking water contains a lot of harmless bacteria. Chlorine, however, which in the studied piping system was added in the form of monochloramine, is not wholly unproblematic.

Climate impact of natural gas often worse than assumed

Dr. Florian Dietrich (blue shirt) and prof. Jia Chen check the measuring systems on the roof of the TUM.
Photo Credit: Andreas Heddergott / Technical University of Munich

Heating and cooking with natural gas often has a greater impact on the climate than commonly believed. This is a conclusion of a new calculation model developed by researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). The difference: the researchers’ model also takes into account the enormous quantities of unused gas released into the atmosphere.

“We wanted to know whether – when gas leakage is also considered – gas or electricity is more climate friendly for heating and cooking,” explains Dr. Florian Dietrich, a researcher at the TUM Associate Professorship of Environmental Sensing and Modeling. In collaboration with researchers at ETH Zurich, the University of Utrecht and the Dutch organization for applied research in natural sciences TNO, the international team used a high-tech measurement station to capture carbon dioxide, methane and carbon monoxide. They also used laser spectrometers for onsite methane measurements. They then combined all variables in a specially designed calculation model. The results were published and verified in a peer review process.

Simple maintenance can reduce hospital Legionella risks

Photo Credit: PublicDomainPictures

Hospital water systems are a significant source of Legionella, resulting in the potentially fatal Legionnaires’ disease – but Flinders University researchers have proven simple maintenance that involves running hot water regularly and flushing the pipes has a huge effect in reducing the risk of the disease.

One of the biggest challenges for Legionella management within large hospital systems is that under unfavorable conditions, Legionella transforms itself into a state (called viable but non culturable – VBNC) that cannot be detected using standard methods.

To understand the extent of the problem, Flinders University researchers conducted the first comprehensive study that quantified all Legionella, including those in the VBNC state, and free-living amoebae from a hospital water system under dynamic flow and temperature conditions.

“We took a different approach because we didn’t know how often the standard method was returning false negative results for Legionella and it’s really hard to determine the optimal management approach if you can’t trust your testing method,” says Flinders University’s Associate Professor Harriet Whiley.