Thanks to a team of Australian researchers, we can now get a detailed idea of what is happening on the deep ocean floor. The first digital map of the seafloor has been created to let us know what’s happening under 70 percent of the planet’s surface. Not only does this give us a new understanding of the oceanic environment, it will also help scientists see how the waters are reacting to climate change.

“Our new map brings out the enormous ecological and geological complexity of the seafloor that before we had no idea about,” said Dr. Dietmar Muller, a geophysicist at the University of Sydney in Australia and co-author of a paper.

When analyzing the findings, researchers found that the majority of the deep ocean floor is littered with the remains of phytoplankton. Due to the warming ocean temperatures, these phytoplankton have declined by 40 percent since the 1950s. Due to the difficulty in studying organisms on the ocean floor, the reasons for these happenings have only been theoretical. However, it has caused great concern due to the sea creatures’ essential role in providing vital support to the marine ecosystem. Due to the new research, scientists can now examine the composition of the remains and see how the ocean responded to and will continue responding to climate change.

“In order to understand environmental change in the oceans we need to better understand what is preserved in the geological record in the seabed,” says lead researcher Dr. Adriana Dutkiewicz from the University of Sydney.

PS: Head over to the Digital Library to read more on climate change!

A small-town farm in Plymouth, Indiana is doing its part to save the environment. The farm, and many other dairy farms across the country, are investing in biogas recovery systems that take unwanted cow manure and turn it into usable electricity. And not just a tiny bit of electricity. This system can produce enough power to light 1,000 homes.

The farm is grappling an issue that many small farms deal with: too much cow poop. Farms often times toss excess manure into open water to eliminate the small for surrounding neighbors. Doing this leads to a whole host of environmental consequences and negatively impacts the surrounding ecosystem.

In order to get rid of the bothersome manure without causing environmental damage, the farmers set up an anaerobic digester to speed up composition without smell or emission of greenhouse gases.

It’s not just this one farm that it doing its part to help the environment. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that last year alone, farmlands eliminated more than three million tons of greenhouse gases via biogas recovery systems. To put it in perspective, that’s like taking 630,000 pollutant causing cars off the road.

The EPA also estimates that if all viable farms were to install biogas recovery systems, they would generate enough electricity to power over a million homes and drastically cut emissions.

However, the roadblock appears when it comes to finding financing for these projects. Though, the federal government remains committed to seeing progress in this sector.

A tiny chip may be the answer to the wide-spread utilization of fuel cells.

A team of researchers from UCLA have developed a nanoelectronic chip that can accurately analyze the chemical reactions that allow fuels cells and batteries to function. The new chip effectively evaluates at the nano level how nanocatalysts convert chemical reactions into electricity.

New Insights About Fuel Cells

Essentially, the chip scales down spectroscopy—doing what a large laboratory would typically do, only more effectively and with the ability to collect new data.

This from UCLA:

Being able to analyze these reactions with increased accuracy, heightened sensitivity and greater cost-effectiveness will vastly improve scientists’ understanding of nanocatalysts, which will enable the development of new environmentally friendly fuel cells that are more efficient, more durable and less expensive to produce. Eventually, those new fuel cells could be used to power vehicles that run on hydrogen, the 10th most abundant element on Earth, and give off water as exhaust.

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In early January, we talked about Bill Gates’ initiative to make poop potable. As part of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s mission to improve sanitation in underdeveloped countries, the business magnate and philanthropist took a sip of water that had been human waste just moments before.

The waste was being filtered through a treatment plant called the OmniProcessor. The plant was designed a part of the Gates Foundation’s Reinvent the Toilet Challenge. Along with being able to make wastewater drinkable, the plant also produce usable electricity.

A Test Run in Africa

Now, the OminProcessor is going from its testing stages to real world application. The plant has taken its first trip to Dakar, Senegal, and while the technology is working, the real world is proving to pose some other challenges.

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Potatoes are great in many forms: mashed, baked, roasted, electrochemical energy source… Most people have seen or experienced the potato battery experiment in a chemistry class, but BatteryBox is taking this exercise to a whole new level.

As you know, one or two potatoes produce enough energy to power a small digital clock. But how much energy would 110 pound of potatoes produce? Enough to charge a smartphone?

Essentially, the team combined the 110 pounds of potatoes to create a galvanic cell.

PS: Check out some more practical applications of electrochemical energy at the 228th ECS Meeting.

The batteries have the ability to be integrated into the surface of the objects, making it seem like seem like there is no battery at all.

A new development out of the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) has yielded a new technique that could make it possible to print batteries on any surface.

With recent interests in flexible electronics—such as bendable screen displays—researchers globally have been investing research efforts into developing printable functional materials for both electronic and energy applications. With this, many researchers predict the future of the li-ion battery as one with far less size and shape restrictions, having the ability to be printed in its entirety anywhere.

The research team from UNIST, led by ECS member Sang-Young Lee, is setting that prediction on the track to reality. Their new paper published in the journal Nano Letters details the printable li-ion battery that can exist on almost any surface.

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The new process uses light to do photochemistry instead of the traditional method of using heat to do chemistry.
Image: Emory University

Scientists from Emory University are opening yet another door to renewable energy efforts. Their new way of performing light-driven reactions based on plasmon—the motion of free electrons that strongly absorb and scatter light—is said to be much more effective than previous processes.

“We’ve discovered a new and unexpected way to use plasmonic metal that holds potential for use in solar energy conversion,” says Tim Lian, professor of physical chemistry at Emory University and the lead author of the research. “We’ve shown that we can harvest the high energy electrons excited by light in plasmon and then use this energy to do chemistry.”

To get a better understanding of surface plasmonic, just think of how a cathedral’s stained glass windows absorb and shatter light.

Researchers involved in this study believe their plasmonic centered process could apply to efforts in electronics and renewable energy. Using plasmon could potentially make light-driven charge transfer for solar energy conversion much more efficient.

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The laboratory-created chemical garden exhibits battery-like properties that may have helped start life on Earth.
Image: Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech

Energy is everywhere. As long as there has been a universe, there has been energy. In fact, some researchers believe that Earth’s very first life forms got a little electrical energy boost from chemical seafloor gardens.

Of course this was only a theory, so scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have grown their on chemical gardens in-house. The have proven strong enough to power a lightbulb, suggesting that the first cell-like organisms may indeed have used seafloor, chimney-shaped structures to channel electricity.

“These chimneys can act like electrical wires on the seafloor,” said Laurie Barge of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We’re harnessing energy as the first life on Earth might have.”

These findings help researchers explore more definitive answers to the question of life on earth and how it all started. The idea of the seafloor chemical garden agrees with an already established scientific theory—alkaline vent hypothesis—that leans toward the idea that life started underwater due to warm, alkaline chimneys.

“Life doesn’t want to get electrocuted, but needs just the right amount of electricity,” said Michael Russell of Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “This new experiment confirms what that amount of electricity is – just under a volt.”

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The cleaning of industrial wastewater is a persistent issue across the globe. If left untreated, these harmful waters could enter open watercourses, dispersing contaminants such as mercury and lead. Not only is this an immediate health risk, but it also threatens the entire ecosystem.

Modern wastewater treatment plants have been able to treat the water, but have not been very environmentally conscious. The typical plant produces CO₂ by burning fossil fuels for power and the general decomposition of the materials in the wastewater. Not to mention, these things require a lot of power. About 12 trillion gallons of wastewater gets treated each year in the United States along, consuming an alarmingly high 3 percent of the nation’s energy grid.

Researchers have already produced power from pee and made poop potable; so why not develop a new type of wastewater treatment device that significantly lessens the severity of CO₂ emissions and simultaneously captures greenhouse gases?

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The new hybrid sol-gel material provides an electrical energy storage capacity rivaling some batteries.
Image: John Toon/Georgia Tech

The future of electric vehicle and defibrillator technologies depend largely on new, innovative energy storage research and improving device power densities. With the high demand for more powerful, efficient energy devices, the researchers from Georgia Tech believe they may have developed what could be the answer to powering large-scale devices.

The team has developed a new capacitor dielectric material. This capacitor—developed from a hybrid silica sol-gel material and self-assembled monolayers of common fatty acid—has the potential to surpass some of today’s conventional batteries in the field of energy and power density.

If the researchers can scale up their current laboratory sample, the new capacitors will be able to provide large amounts of current quickly to large-scale applications.

This from Georgia Tech:

The new material is composed of a silica sol-gel thin film containing polar groups linked to the silicon atoms and a nanoscale self-assembled monolayer of an octylphosphonic acid, which provides insulating properties. The bilayer structure blocks the injection of electrons into the sol-gel material, providing low leakage current, high breakdown strength and high energy extraction efficiency.

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