Fuel cells have long been viewed as a promising power source. These devices, invented in the 1830s, generate electricity directly from chemicals, such as hydrogen and oxygen, and produce only water vapor as emissions. But ...
Materials Science
Oct 3, 2018
1
100
Some 50 million years before humans figured it out, agriculture arrived in the world in a seemingly unlikely place: an ant hill.
Plants & Animals
Oct 1, 2018
0
159
If Lewis Carroll had described in detail the mushroom Alice nibbles in Wonderland to shrink and grow to her rightful size, he might have noted a scarlet cap topped with white warts: the fly amanita.
Molecular & Computational biology
Sep 28, 2018
2
154
An ideal biorefinery would turn renewable crops into a variety of fuels and products with little waste. A significant challenge in realizing this vision is what to do with lignin, a fibrous and difficult-to-break-down material ...
Materials Science
Sep 28, 2018
0
56
In one video, you can see a hungry caterpillar, first working around a leaf's edges, approaching the base of the leaf and, with one last bite, severing it from the rest of the plant. Within seconds, a blaze of fluorescent ...
Biotechnology
Sep 13, 2018
15
2686
University of Wisconsin-Madison materials engineers have made a surprising discovery that could dramatically improve the lifetime of solar energy harvesting devices.
Nanophysics
Sep 7, 2018
3
270
Millenia ago, ancient farmers cleared land to plant wheat and maize, potatoes and squash. They flooded fields to grow rice. They began to raise livestock. And unknowingly, they may have been fundamentally altering the climate ...
Earth Sciences
Sep 6, 2018
74
1431
After a six-hour ride over increasingly treacherous roads, it took a full day's hike up almost 3,000 feet for Leonora Bittleston to reach Nepenthes Camp in the Maliau Basin, an elevated conservation area in Malaysian Borneo ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 29, 2018
0
28
After decades of trapping, the last known American marten was spotted on Isle Royale in 1917. Fifty years later, in 1966, the National Park Service planned to reintroduce martens to the national park situated in Lake Superior, ...
Ecology
Aug 24, 2018
0
18
Some chemicals used to speed up the breakdown of plants for production of biofuels like ethanol are poison to the yeasts that turn the plant sugars into fuel.
Biotechnology
Aug 9, 2018
0
45
