Ammonia (NH3) is a major component in fertilizer and a promising carbon-free energy carrier. However, ammonia production consumes around 2 percent of the world's total energy production and releases 500 Mt of carbon dioxide ...
Nanophysics
Oct 27, 2021
1
2742
A breakthrough in the fight against hunger, three Nobel Prizes, and 150 million tonnes of annual production—yet still a tricky topic for research: For over 100 years, the chemical industry has been using the Haber-Bosch ...
Materials Science
Oct 25, 2021
3
500
Nitrous oxide (N2O) is a potent greenhouse gas, with 300 times the warming ability of carbon dioxide. Due to fertilizer runoff from farm fields, an increasing load of nitrogen is washing into rivers and streams, where nitrogen-breathing ...
Earth Sciences
Oct 19, 2021
0
473
Materials consisting of a few atomic layers display properties determined by quantum physics. In a stack of such layers, vibrations of the atoms can be triggered by infrared light. New experimental and theoretical work shows ...
Quantum Physics
Oct 12, 2021
0
157
Crack! Lightning strikes are bright and loud—violent enough to shake your bones and light up the sky. Now, a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder suggests that these powerful events may also alter the chemistry ...
Earth Sciences
Oct 11, 2021
0
35
Earth's vast habitats from the poles to the equator have robust capacity to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere due to previously undiscovered rock nitrogen weathering reactions that distribute natural fertilizers ...
Earth Sciences
Oct 11, 2021
0
70
Machine learning can pinpoint "genes of importance" that help crops to grow with less fertilizer, according to a new study published in Nature Communications. It can also predict additional traits in plants and disease outcomes ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Sep 24, 2021
0
230
Reactive nitrogen emissions contribute to greenhouse gases, as well as air and water pollution. For the first time, researchers from McGill University have calculated Canada's nitrogen footprint (akin to a carbon footprint) ...
Environment
Sep 21, 2021
0
56
When scientists needed to visualize the structure of the spike protein, which coronaviruses use to infiltrate human cells, they turned to cryo-electron microscopy. One of the most powerful imaging tools in a researcher's ...
General Physics
Sep 21, 2021
0
24
Magnets formed from a single molecule are of particular interest in data storage, since the ability to store a bit on every molecule could vastly increase the storage capacity of computers. Researchers have now developed ...
Materials Science
Sep 14, 2021
0
4299
