Science Daily May 19, 2022 The most advanced carbon capture technologies currently require large amounts of energy and they are expensive. Researchers in the UK have designed a supercapacitor that consists of two electrodes of positive and negative charge. They found that alternating from a negative to a positive voltage improved the supercapacitor’s ability to capture carbon. When the electrodes become charged, the negative plate draws in the CO2 gas, while ignoring other emissions, such as oxygen, nitrogen, and water. Using this method, the supercapacitor both captures carbon and stores energy. They have developed a technique to understand the mechanism […]
Tag Archives: S&T UK
Dual membrane offers hope for long-term energy storage
Science Daily May 3, 2022 Polysulfide-air redox flow batteries demonstrated great potential for long-duration energy storage technologies that can be deployed at grid scale. However, the crossover of polysulfide is one significant challenge. Researchers in the UK have developed a stable and cost-effective alkaline-based hybrid polysulfide-air redox flow battery where a dual-membrane-structured flow cell design mitigates the sulfur crossover issue. Moreover, combining manganese/carbon catalyzed air electrodes with sulfidated Ni foam polysulfide electrodes, the redox flow battery achieves a maximum power density of 5.8 mW cm−2 at 50% state of charge and 55 °C. Compared with the best results obtained to date […]
Climate change triggering global collapse in insect numbers, stressed farmland shows 63% decline: New research
Phys.org April 21, 2022 Although research has shown that biodiversity changes are driven primarily by land-use change and increasingly by climate change, the potential for interaction between these drivers and insect biodiversity on the global scale remains unclear. Researchers in the UK have shown that the interaction between indices of historical climate warming and intensive agricultural land use is associated with reductions of almost 50% in the abundance and 27% in the number of species within insect assemblages relative to those in less-disturbed habitats with lower rates of historical climate warming. These patterns are particularly evident in the tropical realm. […]
Rescued Victorian rainfall data smashes former records
Science Daily March 25, 2022 An international team of researchers (UK, Ireland) led the rainfall Rescue Project to digitize 5.2 million rainfall observations, recorded by hand on paper sheets now stored in the Met Office archives. The UK National Meteorological Archive recently scanned more than 66,000 paper sheets containing 5.28 million hand-written monthly rainfall observations taken across the UK and Ireland between 1677 and 1960. Only a small fraction of these observations was previously digitally available for climate scientists to analyze. More than 16,000 volunteer citizen scientists completed the transcription of these sheets of observations during early 2020 using the […]
Self-healing materials for robotics made from ‘jelly’ and salt
Science Daily February 18, 2022 There are numerous challenges in the deployment of wearable devices with soft sensing technologies due to their poor resilience, high energy consumption, and omnidirectional strain responsivity. Researchers in the UK have developed a versatile ionic gelatin-glycerol hydrogel for soft sensing applications. The device is inexpensive and easy to manufacture, self-healable at room temperature, can undergo strains of up to 454%, presents stability over long periods of time, and is biocompatible and biodegradable. The material is ideal for strain sensing applications, with a linear correlation coefficient R2 = 0.9971 and a pressure-insensitive conduction mechanism. The experimental results show […]
A proposal to use electric charges to encourage raindrops to form in clouds
Phys.org February 9, 2022 Researchers in the UK calculated the electrostatic forces between two water spheres that have not yet grown large enough to be described as raindrops. They found that the greater the variation in charges between droplets, the stronger the attraction between them. And that led them to suggest that if the variation was increased via an electric charge, the droplets would merge, leading to the formation of rain drops. As droplets merge and grow in size, additional electric charge should result in mergers between droplets until they become large enough for gravity to take over and they […]
Scientists develop insect-sized flying robots with flapping wings
Science Daily February 2, 2022 Current flapping MAVs require transmission systems between their actuators and wings, which introduce energetic losses and additional mass, hindering performance. Researchers in the UK have developed a high-performance electrostatic flapping actuation system, the liquid-amplified zipping actuator (LAZA), which induces wing movement by direct application of liquid-amplified electrostatic forces at the wing root, eliminating the requirement of any transmission system and their associated downsides. Thrust up to 5.73 millinewtons was achieved while consuming only 243 milliwatts of electrical power, implying a thrust-to-power ratio of 23.6 newtons per kilowatt, like state-of-the-art flapping MAVs, helicopter rotors, and commercial […]
‘Super jelly’ can survive being run over by a car (with Video)
Phys.org November 25, 2021 The way materials behave is dependent upon the way molecules are joined by crosslinkers. Researchers in the UK used barrel-shaped molecules called cucurbiturils as crosslinking molecule, like molecular handcuff, which hold two guest molecules that prefer to stay inside the cavity for longer than normal keeping the polymer network tightly linked, allowing for it to withstand compression even at 80% water content. They found that the compressive strength could be easily controlled by simply changing the chemical structure of the guest molecule inside the cavity. To make their glass-like hydrogels, the team chose specific guest molecules […]
Novel treatment technology ‘could reduce UK nuclear waste burden’
Phys.org October 12, 2021 Irradiated graphite waste management is one of the major challenges of nuclear power-plant decommissioning throughout the world and significantly in the UK, France, and Russia. Researchers in the UK developed an electrochemical decontamination approach in a high-temperature molten salt medium which was applied to irradiate UK Magnox grade graphite, fixed on the working electrode immersed in LiCl–KCl eutectic at 723 K. By selecting the appropriate value of the absolute magnitude of current and the number of transitions between positive and negative current, substantial removal of radionuclide contamination from the graphite was achieved. Up to 80% reduction […]
AI may predict the next virus to jump from animals to humans
Science Daily September 28, 2021 Researchers in the UK developed machine learning models that identify candidate zoonoses solely using signatures of host range encoded in viral genomes. Within a dataset of 861 viral species with known zoonotic status, their approach outperformed models based on the phylogenetic relatedness of viruses to known human-infecting viruses distinguishing high-risk viruses within families that contain a minority of human-infecting species. The model predictions suggested the existence of generalizable features of viral genomes that are independent of virus taxonomic relationships and that may preadapt viruses to infect humans. Their model reduced a second set of 645 […]