Researchers find value in unusual type of plant material

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 ...

Mimicking termites to generate new materials

Inspired by the way termites build their nests, researchers at Caltech have developed a framework to design new materials that mimic the fundamental rules hidden in nature's growth patterns. The researchers showed that, using ...

Copper chains: Study reveals Earth's deep-seated hold on copper

Earth is clingy when it comes to copper. A new Rice University study this week in the journal Science finds that nature conspires at scales both large and small -- from the realms of tectonic plates down to molecular bonds ...

New clues from the dawn of the solar system

A research group in the UA Lunar and Planetary Laboratory has found evidence in meteorites that hint at the discovery of a previously unknown region within the swirling disk of dust and gas known as the protoplanetary disk ...

Two Solar System puzzles solved

Comets and asteroids preserve the building blocks of our Solar System and should help explain its origin. But there are unsolved puzzles. For example, how did icy comets obtain particles that formed at high temperatures, ...

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