In Washington, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory researchers have devised a way to engineer yeast to produce itaconic acid—a valuable commodity chemical—using data integration and supercomputing power as a guide, helping advance economically attractive replacements for fossil fuels. Itaconic acid has enormous potential as a renewable chemical building block. It could substitute for some fossil-fuel-derived products. […]
In Japan, sorghum, an underrated ancient grain, is slowly becoming well known as a superfood due to its nutrient-dense and gluten-free nature. Sorghum syrup is widely used as a healthy alternative to molasses in the food industry, and this cereal is also used to make gluten-free flour. In addition, sorghum commonly serves as high-quality animal […]
In China, a new electrocatalyst called a-CuTi@Cu converts carbon dioxide (CO2) into liquid fuels. As reported by a team of Chinese researchers in the journal Angewandte Chemie, active copper centered on an amorphous copper/titanium alloy produces ethanol, acetone, and n-butanol with high efficiency. A team from Foshan University (Foshan, Guangdong), the University of Science and […]
In Japan, a peptide sensor to detect water-soluble polymers in wastewater, a major contributor to pollution on par with microplastics, has been developed by scientists from Tokyo Institute of Technology. The new technique takes advantage of the bonding that occurs between peptides and different polymers to train a machine learning algorithm that can identify a […]
In California, two new publicly-available web-based software tools aim to help researchers and companies quickly test different scenarios and explore viable bio-based fuels and products without ever stepping foot in the lab. The tools were developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, with funding support from the U.S. Department of Energy Bioenergy Technologies Office. The first […]
In South Dakota, POET, South Dakota State University and South Dakota Mines held a groundbreaking ceremony for the POET Bioproducts Institute at the Research Park at SDSU. The institute will serve as an innovation center for the development of low-value agricultural and forestry materials into high-value bioproducts such as specialty animal feeds and bioplastics that […]
In Maryland, University of Maryland researchers recently published three papers revealing surprising ways to use wood in three of the top science journals: Shape of (Wooden) Things to Come The advantages of wood as a structural material are legion: renewable, lightweight, naturally durable and strong, and possessing a lower lifecycle cost than most other materials. […]
In Austria, researchers at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) are continuing the Biogas2H2 project. In one of the world’s largest industry-related demonstration plants, they produce high-purity hydrogen directly at an existing biogas plant from real biogas, which includes all the impurities that are present in the gas. The project is funded by the Austrian Research […]
In Japan, bioplastics can be chemically recycled into nitrogen-rich fertilizers in a facile and environmentally friendly way, as recently demonstrated by scientists from Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech). Their findings pave the way towards sustainable circular systems that simultaneously address issues such as plastic pollution, petrochemical resource depletion, and world hunger. The team focused […]
In Washington, D.C., the Chemical Catalysis for Bioenergy Consortium (ChemCatBio) launched the new Catalyst Property Database (CPD). The database is uniquely suited to catalyst development in biomass conversion, as it was designed specifically to handle complex adsorbates such as those found in biomass vapor streams. These features also make it useful in a wide range […]
