Scientists are reporting development of a new method to recycle rare earth elements from wastewater.  Many of today’s technologies, from hybrid car batteries to flat-screen televisions, rely on rare earth elements (REEs) that are in short supply. The process is described in a study in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.  The new process […]

Researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology have now shortened the ethanol biofuel from trees process to a few hours.  It currently takes weeks. Turning trees – the wood chips and sawdust – into biofuel in hours promises new profitability for the Norwegian forestry and wood processing industries, now that the demand for […]

Chemists at the University of California, Davis, and Stanford University are revealing how bacteria make free hydrogen and perhaps opening ways for science to imitate them.  Producing hydrogen easily and cheaply by chemical water splitting is a dream goal for clean, sustainable energy and bacteria have been doing exactly that for billions of years. In […]

Research engineers at the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center at the University of Illinois (UI) find wood biochar supercapacitors can produce as much power as today’s activated-carbon supercapacitors at a fraction of the cost.  The report noted that the wood bio-char would be sourced from forest products waste, an environmentally friendly source to make power storage. […]

Ji-Seon Kim, a senior lecturer in experimental solid-state physics at Imperial College London, who has along with her colleagues, come up with a plastic solar panel technology that might help bring the prices down. Why haven’t solar technologies been more widely adopted?  Quite simply, “they’re too expensive,” said Kim. Kim and her colleagues describe their […]

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