Cleantech News

RSS

Carbonized Fungal Biomass-Manganese Oxide Mineral Composite Holds Potential for Energy Storage Devices

You probably don't think much of fungi, and especially those that turn bread moldy, but researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on March 17, 2016 have evidence that might just change your mind. Their findings suggest that a red bread mold could be the key to producing more sustainable electrochemical materials for use in rechargeable batteries.

18 Mar 2016

EPFL Scientists Achieve Record-Level Reproducibility for Perovskite Solar Cells

EPFL scientists achieve the highest yet reproducibility for perovskite solar cells combined with a boundary-pushing 21.1% efficiency at normal operating conditions.

18 Mar 2016

New Insights into Role of Greenhouse Gases from Land Ecosystems in Climate Change

A new research paper published in Nature, advances the understanding of how greenhouse gases from forests, grasslands, and agriculture other than carbon dioxide play a role in climate change.

18 Mar 2016

Cost-Effective, Compact Microbial Fuel Cells to Generate Electricity from Urine

A new fuel cell that transforms urine into electricity could revolutionize bioenergy production, especially in developing countries. The research work, published in Electrochimica Acta, discusses a new microbial fuel, which is cheaper, smaller in size and more powerful than the conventional ones.

17 Mar 2016

Biological-Based Fuel Cell Uses Waste Tomatoes to Generate Electricity

A group of scientists are working to generate electricity from an unusual source: damaged tomatoes, which are not fit to be sold at grocery stores. The pilot project involves a biological-based fuel cell, which utilizes waste tomatoes discarded during harvests in Florida.

17 Mar 2016

UW Researchers Use New Method to Map Hundreds of Wetlands

For two University of Washington researchers, the real test came as they walked across a barren-looking field.

17 Mar 2016

Researchers Examine Natural Climate Variations 5 Million Years Back to See Key Features of the Earth’s Climate

The Earth’s climate system is characterised by complex interactions between the atmosphere, oceans, ice sheets, landmasses and the biosphere (parts of the world with plant and animal life).

17 Mar 2016

All-Valencian Project to Transform Industrial Waste into Hydrogen Fuel Cells

H2ALRECYCLING is a Valencian project for designing and building a pilot plant to transform hydrogen fuel cells from industrial waste.

17 Mar 2016

Study Findings Help Understand How Vulnerable the Arctic is to Climate Change

A new study of permafrost has found that the ice wedges forming the prevalent honeycomb pattern across the tundra appear to be melting rapidly across the Arctic, changing the hydrology of the region and accelerating the release of greenhouse gases with major implications for global warming.

16 Mar 2016

New Research Provides Glimpse of How Microbes Could Weather Climate Change

Microbes in soil — organisms that exert enormous influence over our planet's carbon cycle — may not be as adaptable to climate change as most scientists have presumed, according to a paper published March 2 in PLOS One.

16 Mar 2016

Study Reveals Ice Wedges are Thawing at Rapid Pace Throughout the Arctic

Throughout the Arctic, ice wedges are thawing at a rapid pace. Changes to these structures, which are very common in permafrost landscapes, have a massive impact on the hydrology of the tundra. This is the result of a study carried out by an international research team in cooperation with the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), which will be published in the journal Nature Geoscience today.

16 Mar 2016

New Model to Improve Predictions of Permafrost Area and Stability in Northern High Latitudes

Uncertainties are a fact of life for those who model climate change and the factors that amplify or moderate its effects. One important dynamic in climate change studies is the extent of permafrost (permanently frozen soils) in the northern high latitudes and the rate at which it defrosts as the climate warms.

16 Mar 2016

Novel ORNL Technique Paves Way for Improving Solar Cell Performance

Measurement and data analysis techniques developed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory could provide new insight into performance-robbing flaws in crystalline structures, ultimately improving the performance of solar cells.

16 Mar 2016

CPI, Merck and Polysolar to Develop Building-Integrated Photovoltaic Windows

The Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) is part of a consortium which is developing building integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) devices that will enable windows of the future to not only generate their own solar power but also provide greater thermal control.

15 Mar 2016

NASA Selects Four Proposals to Develop Advanced Solar Technologies for Deep-Space Exploration

As part of its Game Changing Development (GCD) program, NASA has chosen four proposals to build next-generation solar array technologies for deep space missions. The aim of the program is to develop solar arrays that will help spacecraft to explore space destinations that lie outside of the low-Earth orbit.

15 Mar 2016