In India, India Today reported that IIT Kanpur and NSI Kanpur have joined forces to establish a Center of Excellence for Biofuels, aiming to advance research and technology in ethanol, methanol, bio-CNG, aviation fuel, and green hydrogen production from biomass. Manindra Agrawal, Director of IIT Kanpur said: “NSI Kanpur has been working in this field […]
In California, a team led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has invented a technique to study electrochemical processes at the atomic level with unprecedented resolution and used it to gain new insights into a popular catalyst material. Electrochemical reactions — chemical transformations that are caused by or accompanied by the flow of electric […]
In Spain, OLEAF4VALUE project, a sustainable-oriented EU-funded initiative formed by a consortium of 16 expert partners that aimed at switching the way we think about olive leaves, has developed biomass valorisation strategies to solve the problem of olive leaves removal from the fields after 3 years of work. It has achieved significant milestones since its […]
In Wisconsin, scientists with the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center showed that a strain of Novosphingobium aromaticivorans naturally produces the carotenoid nostoxanthin. By deleting or adding selected genes, they engineered strains that produced the valuable carotenoids beta-carotene, lycopene, zeaxanthin, and astaxanthin. They showed that these engineered strains produced carotenoids at comparable levels when grown either in laboratory […]
In the Netherlands, a fungus living in the sea can break down the plastic polyethylene, provided it has first been exposed to UV radiation from sunlight. Researchers from, among others, the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) published their results in the scientific journal Science of the Total Environment. They expect that many more […]
In India, Fibre2Fashion reported that an AiF project carried out in close cooperation between the German Institutes of Textile and Fiber Research Denkendorf (DITF) and the Freiberg Institute (FILK), will enable the development of synthetic leather using polybutylene succinate (PBS) for both fiber and coating, meeting sustainability criteria. PBS, sourced from renewable materials, allows for […]
In Florida, as a hybrid of Saccharum officinarum and Saccharum spontaneum, sugarcane has the most complex genome of all crops. This complexity means that improving sugarcane through conventional breeding is challenging. Because of this, researchers turn to gene editing tools, such as the CRISPR/Cas9 system to precisely target the sugarcane genome for improvement. In their […]
In New York state, efforts to achieve net-zero carbon emissions from transportation fuels are increasing demand for oil produced by nonfood crops. These plants use sunlight to power the conversion of atmospheric carbon dioxide into oil, which accumulates in seeds. Crop breeders interested in selecting plants that produce a lot of oil look for yellow […]
In Illinois, researchers at Northern Illinois University and the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory aim to financial incentive industry to capture its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by making the process profitable. The scientists have identified a family of tin-based catalysts that efficiently converts CO2 into ethanol, acetic acid or formic acid—commonly produced […]
In Colorado, NREL says building biocrude facilities next to existing refineries—instead of closer to biomass sources—can lower GHG emissions by as much as 150% depending on the exact infrastructure design. That is a striking reduction in emissions, and the researchers detail how industry engineers might achieve it with smart designs that let the facilities share […]
