Converting solar or wind into carbon-based ‘fossil’ fuels might seem anything but green, but when you start with carbon dioxide — which can be dragged out of the air — it’s as green as it gets. The technology that makes it economically feasible isn’t available yet, but a recently published paper presents nice step forward in the effort to not just sequester carbon dioxide, but turn it into a useful fuel that is part of a carbon-neutral future.
Q. Dear Umbra, Olympia recently banned plastic bags, which is great. Here is my problem: Now that stores are not using plastic bags, they have removed all the plastic bag recycle bins. I looked up places to recycle plastic bags in my area, and Lowe’s was listed. I took the bags I had been saving for six months to Lowe’s and they informed me that they would take the bags, but they are not recycled. The plastic bags just are thrown in their garbage. So I am back at the beginning again, trying to find somewhere to recycle the plastic bags that I have saved. Can you help me find somewhere that I could send these formerly recyclable plastic bags? Brooke W. Olympia, Wash. A…
Suzanne JacobsDo you ever feel like this is a microbial world, and that we’re just living in it? It seems like every day, scientists are discovering new ways that these invisible communities are manipulating our health, impacting the climate, keeping ecosystems in check, and (maybe) occasionally killing off more than 70 percent of all species on Earth. Well, now we can add one more thing to their resume: heating up the desert. According to a new paper published in Nature Communications, bacterial communities that form on arid soil can increase surface temperatures by as much as 10 degrees C. They do this by secreting a kind of “sunscreen” that, while protecting the microbes themselves from harmful ultraviolet light, actually absorbs sunlight that would otherwise reflect off the soil…
Magnets are well-known from the physics lessons at school, but they are hardly covered in chemistry lectures; and it is still a chemical process by means of which researchers have succeeded in controlling magnetic properties in bulk ferromagnets. While physical processes may influence the orientation of the magnetic fields, the chemical process in this case controls magnetism in carefully chosen strongly ferromagnetic material systems. The working principle used in this case is similar to the concept of lithium-ion batteries.
