Bacteria on nanowires convert sunlight, carbon dioxide and water to organic building blocks University of California – Berkeley If humans ever hope to colonize Mars, the settlers will need to manufacture on-planet a huge range of organic compounds, from fuels to drugs, that are too expensive to ship from Earth. University of California, Berkeley, and…
News Release 6-Feb-2020 University of South Australia Sugar ants mining urine in sand on Kangaroo Island Credit UniSA / Sophie Petit An unlikely penchant for pee is putting a common sugar ant on the map, as new research from the University of South Australia shows their taste for urine could play a role in reducing…
Reposted from Dr. Roy Spencer’s Blog February 5th, 2020 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D. Note: What I present below is scarcely believable to me. I have looked for an error in my analysis, but cannot find one. Nevertheless, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so let the following be an introduction to a potential issue…
American Society of Agronomy Fungi play an important role in the ecosystem by decomposing plant and animal debris into nutrients and simpler compounds. Credit Susan V. Fisk When we think of climate change, we tend to think about greenhouse gases, fossil fuels and pollution. Most of us don’t think about fungi. But Kathleen Treseder does.…
by Kevin Kilty An article in the January 2020 Issue of Physics Today (1) presents an interesting and very readable overview of methods to capture and store away CO2 emissions. The purpose of this guest blog is to summarize a few key points the paper makes, and add some commentary. WUWT has covered some of…
Guest post by Rud Istvan, As most WUWT readers know, the issue of carbon sequestration is an important but largely IPCC undiscussed ‘anthropogenic global warming’ question. I got to thinking about it again as a result of the Australian brush fires that are dramatically releasing sequestered brush carbon. And it has been years since the…
What could go wrong? ~cr From Nature Feat could turn bacteria into biological factories for energy and even food. The bacterium Escherichia coli has been engineered to grow by consuming carbon dioxide.Credit: Steve Gschmeissner/SPL E. coli is on a diet. Researchers have created a strain of the lab workhorse bacterium — full name Escherichia coli…
From Energy.gov November 14, 2019 WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) announced up to $43 million in funding to develop carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies that enable power generators to be responsive to grid conditions in a high variable renewable energy (VRE) penetration environment. The…
Guest essay by Eric Worrall According to the study authors, frequent controlled burns reduce the ability of some forests to sequester CO2. More frequent fires reduce soil carbon and fertility, slowing the regrowth of plantsLong-term effects of repeated fires on soils found to have significant impacts on carbon storage not previously considered in global greenhouse…
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis A new global assessment shows that human impacts have greatly reduced plant-fungus symbioses, which play a key role in sequestering carbon in soils. Restoring these ecosystems could be one strategy to slow climate change. Human-induced transformations of Earth’s ecosystems have strongly affected distribution patterns of plant-fungus symbioses known as…