Carbon dioxide is transformed into carbon nanotubes which serve as high performance anodes in lithium-ion and sodium-ion batteries, offering a new route to attribute economic value to carbon dioxide.A key challenge for atmospheric carbon capture and conversion technologies is the cost of operation or materials versus the perceived economic benefit to modern society. Issues such as stable carbon storage ultimately establish a cost and practicality bottleneck for many carbon capture processes. (1) Such issues can be resolved with the development of techniques that synergistically capture and convert atmospheric emissions into materials that can be developed into high-value products. (2) This produces a secondary market for greenhouse gas emissions and provides an economic value to pollutants that otherwise challenge the promise of long-term human sustainability on Earth. In this manner, the elemental constituents of carbon dioxide, the most notable greenhouse gas, involve carbon and oxygen, which are foundational elemental building blocks for technological systems. Specifically, carbon-based materials are widely used in applications. One of the most notable applications of carbon is for anodes in lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, which are the principal rechargeable battery for electric vehicles (EVs) and consumer electronics. (3-5) Commercial Li-ion batteries most commonly rely on anodes produced with graphite that exhibit a theoretical Li-anode capacity of 1 Li: 6 C, or 372 mAh g–1, (5) and an observed capacity of 280–320 mAh g–1. (6) Because of the greater Earth abundance of Na compared to Li (2.3% vs lithium’s 0.0017% in the Earth’s crust), recent efforts have also focused on carbon-based anodes for Na-ion battery systems. (7-9) A key challenge has been the low capacity of Na in crystalline carbons (32–35 mAh g–1) which can be improved by introducing defects into the lattice or engineering the electrode–electrolyte interface to facilitate solvent-assisted intercalation. (10-12) Whereas other materials besides carbon can form low-potential compounds practical for Na-ion and Li-ion anodes, such as Si and Sn, (9, 13) issues of rapid capacity fade, solid-electrolyte interphase vulnerability, (14) and existing commercial manufacturing infrastructure relevant to carbon-based anodes all present numerous technological challenges in transitioning battery systems away from carbon-based electrodes. Most recently, efforts to combine carbon-based Earth-abundant electrode materials, such as  banana peels and peat moss, with sodium-ion batteries has made forward progress in this research area. (15, 16)  In this report, we build upon the solar thermal electrochemical process (STEP), (17-21) which is designed to convert greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into a useful carbon commodity. This technique uses inexpensive electrode materials (galvanized steel cathode and a nickel anode) and molten carbonate electrolytes that are heated and powered using concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) cells that convert sunlight into electricity at 39% efficiency. STEP has been shown to function effectively with or without solar powered operation to electrolytically split water, carbon dioxide, or metal oxides, (22-24) produce STEP carbon, (18) produce STEP ammonia and STEP organic, (25-27) and produce STEP iron or cement. (28-30) Here we show that this process can be used as a sustainable synthetic pathway for defect-controlled CNT and CNF materials, which exhibit excellent performance in the context of lithium-ion and sodium-ion battery anode materials. This presents a sustainable route to convert carbon dioxide into materials relevant to both grid-scale and portable storage systems.     https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acscentsci.5b00400#   ....and.....        New catalyst transforms carbon dioxide into sustainable byproduct. Carbon capture method works by using carbon to make acetic acid.  Northwestern University researchers have worked with an international team of collaborators to create acetic acid out of carbon monoxide derived from captured carbon. The innovation, which uses a novel catalyst created in the lab of professor Ted Sargent, could spur new interest in carbon capture and storage.       https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2023/05/catalyst-transforms-carbon-dioxide/     

What is graphene? The truth about graphene. Ever since it was first discovered in 2004, graphene has been hailed as one of the most important breakthroughs in materials since the plastics revolution more than a century ago. The early predictions were that graphene would almost immediately enable the kinds of products and technologies that we're used to seeing in sci-fi movies. Cut to more than a decade and a half later and that still hasn't happened. Not even close. With opinions split between people overhyping graphene or calling it a massive disappointment, it's time we got to the truth of what is really happening with this so-called 'wonder material'. Graphene is the name for a single layer (monolayer) sheet of carbon atoms that are bonded together in a repeating pattern of hexagons. This sheet is only one atom thick. Monolayers of graphene stacked on top of each other form graphite. Since a typical carbon atom has a diameter of about 0.33 nanometers, there are about 3 million layers of graphene in a 1 mm thick sheet of graphite. In scientific terms: The extraordinary characteristics of graphene originate from the 2p orbitals, which form the π state bands that delocalize over the sheet of carbons that constitute graphene. Harder than diamond yet more elastic than rubber; tougher than steel yet lighter than aluminum – graphene is the strongest known material. To put this in perspective: if a sheet of cling film (like kitchen wrap film) had the same strength as a pristine single layer of graphene, it would require the force exerted by a mass of 2,000 kg, or a large car, to puncture it with a pencil. Thanks to the unique structure of graphene, it possesses other amazing characteristics: Its high electron mobility is 100x faster than silicon; it conducts heat 2x better than diamond; its electrical conductivity is 13x better than copper; it absorbs only 2.3% of reflecting light; it is impervious so that even the smallest atom (helium) can't pass through a defect-free monolayer graphene sheet; and its high surface area of 2,630 square meters per gram means that with less than 3 grams you could cover an entire soccer field (well, practically speaking you would need 6 grams, since 2,630 m2/g is the surface area for both sides of a graphene sheet). Graphene represents a conceptually new class of materials that are only one atom thick, so-called two-dimensional (2D) materials (they are called 2D because they extend in only two dimensions: length and width; as the material is only one atom thick, the third dimension, height, is considered to be zero). And it is only at this single- or few-layer state that graphene’s amazing properties appear. Graphene is the basic building block for other graphitic materials like carbon nanotubes              https://www.nanowerk.com/what_is_graphene.php         University of ManchesterGraphene Applications. Graphene is a disruptive technology; one that could open up new markets and even replace existing technologies or materials. It is when graphene is used both to improve an existing material and in a transformational capacity that its true potential can be realised. Combining all of graphene's amazing properties could create an impact of the scale last seen with the Industrial Revolution The vast number of products, processes and industries for which graphene could create a significant impact all stems from its amazing properties.No other material has the breadth of superlatives that graphene boasts, making it ideal for countless applications. It is many times stronger than steel, yet incredibly lightweight and flexible. It is electrically and thermally conductive but also transparent. It is the world's first 2D material and is one million times thinner than the diameter of a single human hair.         https://www.graphene.manchester.ac.uk/learn/applications/  

 Why the Godfather of A.I. Fears What He’s Built. Geoffrey Hinton has spent a lifetime teaching computers to learn. Now he worries that artificial brains are better than ours.By Joshua Rothman November 13, 2023    In your brain, neurons are arranged in networks big and small. With every action, with every thought, the networks change: neurons are included or excluded, and the connections between them strengthen or fade. This process goes on all the time—it’s happening now, as you read these words—and its scale is beyond imagining. You have some eighty billion neurons sharing a hundred trillion connections or more. Your skull contains a galaxy’s worth of constellations, always shifting. Geoffrey Hinton, the computer scientist who is often called “the godfather of A.I.,” handed me a walking stick. “You’ll need one of these,” he said. Then he headed off along a path through the woods to the shore. It wound across a shaded clearing, past a pair of sheds, and then descended by stone steps to a small dock. “It’s slippery here,” Hinton warned, as we started down. New knowledge incorporates itself into your existing networks in the form of subtle adjustments. Sometimes they’re temporary: if you meet a stranger at a party, his name might impress itself only briefly upon the networks in your memory. But they can also last a lifetime, if, say, that stranger becomes your spouse. Because new knowledge merges with old, what you know shapes what you learn. If someone at the party tells you about his trip to Amsterdam, the next day, at a museum, your networks may nudge you a little closer to the Vermeer. In this way, small changes create the possibility for profound transformations. Hinton spent three decades as a computer-science professor at the University of Toronto—a leading figure in an unglamorous subfield known as neural networks, which was inspired by the way neurons are connected in the brain. Because artificial neural networks were only moderately successful at the tasks they undertook—image categorization, speech recognition, and so on—most researchers considered them to be at best mildly interesting, or at worst a waste of time / In 1949, a psychologist named Donald Hebb proposed a simple rule for how people learn, often summarized as “Neurons that fire together wire together.” Once a group of neurons in your brain activates in synchrony, it’s more likely to do so again; this helps explain why doing something is easier the second time. But it quickly became apparent that computerized neural networks needed another approach in order to solve complicated problems. As a young researcher, in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, Hinton drew networks of neurons in notebooks and imagined new knowledge arriving at their borders. How would a network of a few hundred artificial neurons store a concept? How would it revise that concept if it turned out to be flawed?    Skeptics who say that we overestimate the power of A.I. point out that a great deal separates human minds from neural nets. For one thing, neural nets don’t learn the way we do: we acquire knowledge organically, by having experiences and grasping their relationship to reality and ourselves, while they learn abstractly, by processing huge repositories of information about a world that they don’t really inhabit. But Hinton argues that the intelligence displayed by A.I. systems transcends its artificial origins.  Hinton left Google, where he’d worked since the acquisition. He was worried about the potential of A.I. to do harm, and began giving interviews in which he talked about the “existential threat” that the technology might pose to the human species. The more he used ChatGPT, an A.I. system trained on a vast corpus of human writing, the more uneasy he got. One day, someone from Fox News wrote to him asking for an interview about artificial intelligence. Hinton enjoys sending snarky single-sentence replies to e-mails—after receiving a lengthy note from a Canadian intelligence agency, he responded, “Snowden is my hero”—and he began experimenting with a few one-liners. Eventually, he wrote, “Fox News is an oxymoron.” Then, on a lark, he asked ChatGPT if it could explain his joke. The system told him his sentence implied that Fox News was fake news, and, when he called attention to the space before “moron,” it explained that Fox News was addictive, like the drug OxyContin. Hinton was astonished. This level of understanding seemed to represent a new era in A.I......read on                          https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/geoffrey-hinton-profile-ai?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Movies_111823&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&bxid=5e2bb2c62a077c05ea0a9723&cndid=59734366&hasha=284acdf0ea1b080a3966b6c47b8c38c0&hashb=a4ccd8de508e6a2ad52eb405268d00c48cb0e5a6&hashc=7a51910293749398eff22b8bf795b4f5ed4d3ebff046adf7c9ebf33811a9eca8&esrc=subscribe-page&utm_term=TNY_Movies            

Microbes could help reduce the need for chemical fertilizers. New coating protects nitrogen-fixing bacteria from heat and humidity, which could allow them to be deployed for large-scale agricultural use. Anne Trafton | MIT News November 15, 2023 Production of chemical fertilizers accounts for about 1.5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. MIT chemists hope to help reduce that carbon footprint by replacing some chemical fertilizer with a more sustainable source — bacteria. Bacteria that can convert nitrogen gas to ammonia could not only provide nutrients that plants need, but also help regenerate soil and protect plants from pests. However, these bacteria are sensitive to heat and humidity, so it’s difficult to scale up their manufacture and ship them to farms. To overcome that obstacle, MIT chemical engineers have devised a metal-organic coating that protects bacterial cells from damage without impeding their growth or function. In a new study, they found that these coated bacteria improved the germination rate of a variety of seeds, including vegetables such as corn and bok choy. This coating could make it much easier for farmers to deploy microbes as fertilizers, says Ariel Furst, the Paul M. Cook Career Development Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and the senior author of the study. “We can protect them from the drying process, which would allow us to distribute them much more easily and with less cost because they’re a dried powder instead of in liquid,” she says. “They can also withstand heat up to 132 degrees Fahrenheit, which means that you wouldn’t have to use cold storage for these microbes.” Benjamin Burke ’23 and postdoc Gang Fan are the lead authors of the open-access paper, which appears in the Journal of the American Chemical Society Au. MIT undergraduate Pris Wasuwanich and Evan Moore ’23 are also authors of the study. Protecting microbes...... Chemical fertilizers are manufactured using an energy-intensive process known as Haber-Bosch, which uses extremely high pressures to combine nitrogen from the air with hydrogen to make ammonia. In addition to the significant carbon footprint of this process, another drawback to chemical fertilizers is that long-term use eventually depletes the nutrients in the soil. To help restore soil, some farmers have turned to “regenerative agriculture,” which uses a variety of strategies, including crop rotation and composting, to keep soil healthy. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria, which convert nitrogen gas to ammonia, can aid in this approach. Some farmers have already begun deploying these “microbial fertilizers,” growing them in large onsite fermenters before applying them to the soil. However, this is cost-prohibitive for many farmers. Shipping these bacteria to rural areas is not currently a viable option, because they are susceptible to heat damage. The microbes are also too delicate to survive the freeze-drying process that would make them easier to transport. To protect the microbes from both heat and freeze-drying, Furst decided to apply a coating called a metal-phenol network (MPN), which she had previously developed to encapsulate microbes for other uses, such as protecting therapeutic bacteria delivered to the digestive tract.        https://news.mit.edu/2023/microbes-could-reduce-need-for-chemical-fertilizers-1115#:~:text=Production%20of%20chemical%20fertilizers%20accounts,a%20more%20sustainable%20source%20%E2%80%94%20bacteria.