A team of researchers of Jay Keasling’s group with the US Department of Energy (DOE)’s Berkeley Lab operated Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) has engineered the bacterium Ralstonia eutropha – a microbe now used to produce biodegradable plastic for the production of fatty acid-derived, diesel-range methyl ketones. The team uses R. eutropha, which is a chemolithoautotroph […]

A team of researchers at MIT is developing an alternative nuclear fuel rod cladding that could provide similar protection for nuclear fuel, while reducing the risk of hydrogen production by roughly a thousandfold. For many people the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster marked another reason nuclear fuel should be discarded as a power source.  The […]

Professor Edward Cocking, Director of The University of Nottingham’s Centre for Crop Nitrogen Fixation, has developed a unique method of putting nitrogen-fixing bacteria into the cells of plant roots.  The sensational breakthrough came when he found a specific strain of nitrogen-fixing bacteria in sugar cane that he discovered could intracellularly colonize all major crop plants. […]

Researchers from Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) of South Korea have developed a new plasmonic material that can be applied to both polymer light-emitting diodes and polymer solar cells.  The new material and build process offers world-record high performance, through a simple and cheap process. Most semiconducting optoelectronic devices (OEDs), including photodiodes, […]

CERN (The French acronym for the European Center for Nuclear Research) scientists have reinforced the theory of how one particularly rare subatomic particle decays into something else.  It’s a discovery of evidence that adds certainty to our thinking about how the universe began and keeps running.  For getting the energy out of E=MC2, the standard […]

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