Green Technology Forum

Two large-scale carbon sequestration projects — the West Coast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership and the Midwest Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership — landed a total of $126.6 million in U.S. Department of Energy funds. The cash will be used to test carbon sequestration technology in California and Ohio. The two projects are the fifth and sixth projects the DOE has funded to improve carbon storage technology.

Both projects are intended to demonstrate the CO2 injection process, from pre-injection characterization to post-injection monitoring, and between the two projects, the DOE expects to see injections of one million tons or more of CO2. So far, the DOE has pursued similar tests in the Plains, Southeast and Southwest regions, through similar regional partnerships. DOE acting deputy secretary of energy Jeffrey Kuper calls these projects “the most promising of the major geologic basins in the United States.” He followed up in a press release from the DOE by saying that, “Collectively, these formations have the potential to store more than 100 years of CO2 emissions from all major point sources in North America.”

Source: matternetwork.com

In the unknowns of emerging nanotechnology, researchers are wondering if the science behind trendy no-smell socks, underwear and hunting gear might create unintended consequences in the environment.

Just a few simulated washings, for example, can pull nanosilver out of new socks that rely on it for killing odors, researchers said Sunday. That action sets the substance free to travel into wastewater and perhaps into fertilizer.

That prospect underscores the importance of studying nanosized materials that are increasingly a part of clothing and medical, electronic, and other consumer products, said UC Davis professor Alexandra Navrotsky.

“As a society, we should be doing research on these effects ideally before products go to market, not after,” said Navrotsky, who heads a campus nanomaterials research unit.

Source: sacbee.com

Embryos containing human and animal material have been created in Britain for the first time, a month before the House of Commons votes on new laws to regulate the research.

A team at Newcastle University announced yesterday that it had successfully generated “admixed embryos” by adding human DNA to empty cow eggs in the first experiment of its kind in Britain.

Source: timesonline.co.uk

Their day job is to keep trees upright. But now the forest’s tiniest building blocks are on their way into fancy products for the future.Imagine a packaging material that kills bacteria and keeps food longer in good condition. Or a disposable duvet cover that keeps infection away from you when you lie in a hospital bed.

Scientists in Trondheim believe that a lot of exciting new products can be created if we can manage to make use of some of Nature’s tiniest construction materials. They are called “fibrils”; a word you have probably never heard of. But in fact, there are millions of them in the paper you have in your hands just now.

A wonder of Nature
Midsummer night, 2005: a steady stream of print journalists and TV teams arrive on the SINTEF/NTNU campus, where they are greeted by proud metallurgists in lab-coats and safety helmets. They have achieved large-scale production of carbon nanotubes, a material with a tensile strength ten times as high as the strongest steel, but weighing only one tenth as much.

This super-material was created in a 30 000 degree plasma arc.

Little do the reporters know of what is going on in the building next door, which belong to the Paper and Fibre Institute (PFI). There, and in the adjacent laboratories, a handful of busy people from PFI, SINTEF and NTNU are working on fibrils – nanocomponents that Nature creates all by itself, with the help of sunlight, air and water.

Fibrils form continuously in all growing trees. In terms of strength, they cannot be compared with carbon nanotubes, but they are strong enough for SINTEF’s Bjørn Steinar Tanem to regard them as potential reinforcement materials in plastics, as he sits and admires them in the electron microscope.

Reinforcement rods of sugar
Fibrils are Nature’s own mini-mini-reinforcement rods. They consist of long sugar molecules (cellulose), arranged in bundles These bundles make up the wall of the drinking straw-like wood cells that tree-trunks consist of.

It is the tough strength of the fibrils that keeps the giants of the forest swaying but upright in the strongest gusts of wind. The material has evolved in one of the world’s biggest nano-laboratories: the forest.

“And Nature has taken millions of years to perfect the process,” says Tanem.

In paper mills, the cells are beaten and squashed flat, to re-appear in the form of paper fibres; or by boiling them, they can be turned into cellulose.

It is already quite possible to separate the fibrils from wood cells, and to extract bundles of molecules that are measured in nanometres; i.e. millionths of a millimetre. But the process is expensive.

Now scientists in many laboratories in the western world, including Trondheim, are trying to make the process more energy- and cost-efficient. But this is no easy job, according to Kristin Syverud of the Paper and Fibre Institute.

“It has taken a lot of energy to build up these wood cells in Nature, and then we come along and want to use as little energy as possible to tear them apart again.”

Valuable strength
PFI has been working for three years on a basic research project on fibrils, with financial support from the Research Council of Norway and in close cooperation with scientists from SINTEF and NTNU. According to Syverud, there is no lack of scientific challenges, but she believes that the topic is worth a bit of effort, since fibrils possess many qualities that fascinate the scientists, one of them being their strength.

Fibrils are long in comparison with their diameter, which makes them good at absorbing forces. According to SINTEF’s Tanem, they are therefore very suitable as reinforcements for plastics. He predicts, for example, that they could enable plastics to be used in automotive components.

The Trondheim scientists wish to use fibrils in biopolymers; materials produced from natural products such as maize starch. The aim is to develop composite structures whose life cycle will have the least possible impact on the environment.

“Fibrils can give biopolymers new, improved properties which, in conjunction with good design, could form the basis of thinner-walled moulded products, for example, thus reducing the amount of raw material needed,” says Tanem.

However, the first necessity is for more research. For one thing, getting the fibrils into plastic is no simple task. But according to Tanem, the group has already made progress in this aspect.

As a parallel activity, PhD student Martin Andersen at NTNU and SINTEF’s Per Martin Stenstad have been manipulating the surface of the fibrils, producing the alterations that are needed to make them “comfortable” within the plastic matrix.

PFI’s Kristin Syverud is particularly taken by the results of a quite different application.

Combating bacteria
The surface of fibrils makes it easy to link them to other active substances, and here too, surface scientists Andersen and Stenstad have been using their expertise. Stenstad, in fact, has worked on similar projects with the famous “Ugelstad microspheres”. For this “fibrils with attachments” variant, the Trondheim scientists selected a chemical that kills micro-organisms, which they have managed to make stick tightly to the fibrils.

“This is important, for substances of this sort must not leach out and end up in the wrong place,” says Syverud.

She explains that these results have spawned exciting product concepts within the project group, including the idea of using fibrils to make bactericidal food wrappings, disposable duvet covers and water filters.

The list of potential applications for fibrils is long, ranging over several branches of industry (see fact-box). However, the scientists still have a good deal to work on before fibrils are ready to hit the shelves.

source: azonnano.com

The biological pathway that powers sperm to swim long distances could be harnessed to nanotech devices, releasing drugs or performing mechanical functions inside the body, according to new research.

The work by researchers at Cornell’s Baker Institute of Animal Health may be the first demonstration of how multistep biological pathways can be assembled and function on a human-made device.

“One of the major limitations in making implantable, nanomedical devices is providing power to them,” said Travis, who conducts his research at the James A. Baker Institute for Animal Health, part of Cornell’s College of Veterinary Medicine. “If you can engineer a device that can make its own energy, then it can potentially last longer and regulate its own task rate.”

Another potential use for this technology: creating nanoscale pumps that could release chemotherapeutics or antibiotics into specific places in the body.

Mammalian sperm have to delivery energy to the long, thin, whip-like tails that power their swimming. Sperm meet the challenge, in part, by onsite power generation, modifying the enzymes of glycolysis so that they can attach themselves to a solid structure running the major length of the sperm tail. From that secure perch, glycolytic enzymes convert sugar into ATP, supplying energy all along the sperm’s bending and flexing tail.

Chinatsu Mukai, Alex Travis, and others at Cornell’s College of Veterinary Science looked at the early steps in the glycolysis pathway to see if they could move it from the thin “fibrous sheath” that covers the sperm tail to a solid inorganic substitute–a nickel-NTA (nitrilotriacetic acid) chip.

First, the researchers replaced the sperm-specific targeting domain of hexokinase, the first enzyme of glycolysis, with a tag that binds to a special gold surface. Even when tethered, the enzyme remained functional. Next they tagged the second enzyme in the pathway, glucose-6-phosphate isomerase. This too was active when tethered. With both attached to the same support, the enzymes acted in series with the product of the first reaction serving as substrate for the second.

These are only the first steps in reproducing the full glycolytic pathway on an inorganic support, say Mukai and Travis. Mukai and Travis suggest that their work serves as proof of principle that the organization of the glycolytic pathway in sperm might provide a natural engineering solution of how to produce ATP locally on nano devices.

source: ScienceDaily

The U.S. Climate Change Science Program published a report today that quantifies North America’s net contribution of carbon to the atmosphere and catalogues sources and sinks of carbon on the continent.

“The North American Carbon Budget and Implications for the Global Carbon Cycle” is the latest report by the CCSP, which will publish 21 reports by the end of 2008. The report analyzes the amounts of carbon emitted by industry sector, the amount absorbed naturally and how these amounts relate to the global carbon budget influenced by other regions of the globe, with particular attention given to characterizing the certainty and uncertainty with which these budget elements are known. The recently released report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change attributes carbon in the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide and methane as very likely the leading contributor to global warming.

“This information is critical to understanding the factors that shape our global climate,” said Bill Brennan, acting CCSP director and NOAA’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Affairs. “The 21 CCSP reports are designed to help scientists answer key questions about climate change, provide the best possible science to stimulate public discussion and assist decision-making on key climate-related issues. We now have a comprehensive understanding of how our continent is contributing to greenhouse gases overall.”

The report finds North America’s fossil fuel emissions are greater than 25 percent of global emissions. The conversion of fossil fuels to energy, such as electricity generation, is the single largest carbon contributor, with transportation second. The report details how the growth of vegetation blanketing North America absorbs large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere.

The report points out a greater than three-to-one imbalance between the fossil fuel sources and the ability of vegetation to absorb carbon. This results in a net release to the atmosphere (over one gigaton of carbon per year in 2003), but there is still some uncertainty in quantifying the North American sink compared to the carbon emission sources. The carbon absorption by vegetation, primarily in the form of forest growth, is expected to decline as maturing forests grow more slowly and take up less carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration

Luca Technologies, a Colorado start-up, is harnessing “geobioreactors”, microorganisms capable of converting coal into methane. They hope to introduce their hydrocarbon-eating bugs into U.S. coal fields and harness the resulting natural gas. And some big backers are betting that Luca’s technology will pay off. In late September, Luca raised $20 million in venture funding. They aim to start operating commercially in a few years.

Japanese researchers have developed a hybrid larch tree with 30 percent greater carbon storage capacity than typical larch trees. These rapidly growing trees could be used as ‘carbon capture’ machines, storing large amounts of CO2, then harvested to create energy (liquid fuels or electricity), while the CO2 they release during the process is captured and geosequestered.

“Salmon sperm is considered a waste product of the fishing industry. It’s thrown away by the ton,” says Professor Andrew Steckl. “It’s natural, renewable and perfectly biodegradable.” Now there’s a biomaterial we hadn’t thought of, especially for Steckl’s intended purpose—BioLEDs, light emitting diodes that incorporate DNA thin films for improved efficiency, sustainability and economy.

Green Technology Forum director Dr. George Elvin talks to Sprig.com about green technology in this 4-minute video interview in New York. He describes the key attributes of green technologies and what we at Green Technology Forum are doing to promote them at our own offices. And he reveals the most essential missing ingredient in today’s green revolution.