Zero Carbon: Kicking the hornet’s nest Chris Hatch | Opinion | March 12th 2024 It’s time for a serious look at shading the Earth, say the Swiss. Switzerland kicked the hornet’s nest of geoengineering with an official proposal at the UN Environment Assembly’s latest gathering in Nairobi.The Swiss wanted the UN to set up an expert group to study “the risks, benefits and uncertainties” of blocking some of the sun’s rays using techniques of solar radiation modification (SRM). The most common suggestion is to inject sulphur aerosols into the atmosphere and reflect some fraction of the sun’s heat before it hits the Earth. The proposal provoked fierce opposition, especially from African nations, which countered with a demand for a “non-use” agreement on SRM. After some cantankerous debate, nothing was agreed. Switzerland ultimately pulled its proposal, saying, “At least we managed to start a global conversation about this important topic.”In truth, that conversation is already well underway. In the past several months, climate engineering has been part of reports and research strategies issued by the U.S. government, as well as the European Commission and the European Parliament. There’s a Climate Overshoot Commission studying geoengineering chaired by the former head of the WTO that includes Kim Campbell, who was (briefly) Canada’s 19th prime minister. Luminaries of climate science like James Hansen are calling for intensified research and there are now institutes at various universities and scientific conferences dedicated to the topic. It’s a hornet’s nest even in academic circles where some scientists say we’d better get our emergency options figured out, while others think we’re already running too many geoengineering experiments altering the atmosphere with heat-trapping gasses.  Almost everyone involved seems to think it’s a desperate idea. Tempered by the fact that we’re headed into desperate territory. “Solar radiation management is both a terrifying, terrible idea and an absolutely inevitable future,” says Nils Gilman, editor at Noema Magazine......read on              

Scientists from South Korea's Yonsei University have invented a potential future meat alternative. The beef rice was made by inserting muscle and fat stem cells from cows into grains of rice and leaving them to grow in a Petri dish. Because the rice grains are porous and have a rich internal structure, the cells can grow there in a similar way to how they would within an animal. A coating of gelatine – in this case, fish-derived – further helps the cells to attach to the rice. Although beef rice might sound like a form of genetically modified food, there is no altering of DNA in the plants or animals. Instead, this process constitutes a type of cell-cultured or lab-grown meat but with the beef grown inside rice. In a paper published in the journal Matter, the Yonsei University researchers explain that their process is similar to that used to make a product already sold in Singapore – a cultured meat grown in soy-based textured vegetable protein (TVP). Soy and nuts are the first foods that have been used for animal cell culturing, they say, but their usefulness is limited because they are common allergens and do not have as much cell-holding potential as rice. The nutritional gains for their beef rice are also currently small, but the researchers from Yonsei University's Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering say that with further optimisation, more cells and therefore more protein could be packed in. The hybrid rice contains 3890 milligrams of protein and 150 milligrams of fat per 100 grams – just 310 milligrams more protein and 10 milligrams more fat than standard rice. "Although hybrid rice grains still have a lower protein content than beef, advances in technology that can improve the cell capacity of rice grains will undoubtedly improve the nutritional content of hybrid rice," the researchers said in their paper. The scientists also believe the product could be inexpensively commercialised and tout the short time frame required to boost nutrition through culturing......read on       https://www.dezeen.com/2024/02/22/beef-rice-meat-alternative-yonsei-university/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Dezeen%20Agenda%20100&utm_content=Dezeen%20Agenda%20100+CID_6c87db3baa61e2e553adea3049c757a8&utm_source=Dezeen%20Mail&utm_term=Read%20more

Will Plants Ever Fertilize Themselves? Biologists aim to engineer crops that can eat nitrogen straight from the air. Matthew Hutson February 6, 2024.Here’s the thing about nitrogen. It’s essential for life—a key ingredient in both DNA and proteins. It also makes up seventy-eight per cent of the air we breathe. It would be useful for us if we could pull nitrogen out of the air and make use of it inside our bodies. But nitrogen atoms typically come in pairs—N2 molecules—that our cells can’t easily pry apart. Instead, we get our nitrogen by eating plants, or by eating animals that eat plants (or animals that eat animals that eat plants). Unfortunately, plants are in the same boat. They can’t make direct use of atmospheric nitrogen, either. In fact, the only cells on Earth that can render nitrogen palatable for plants and animals are certain kinds of microbes. These microbes, known as diazotrophs, “fix” nitrogen, by using N2 to make NH3, also known as ammonia. The nitrogen in this ammonia is ready to eat. The survival of every plant and animal on Earth depends on the work of diazotrophs, which must fix enough nitrogen to keep the biosphere’s machinery running.For most of human history, the world’s diazotrophs fixed enough nitrogen to keep up with the human appetite. But that started to change about a hundred and twenty years ago. In 1898, William Crookes, the president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, gave an alarming inaugural address. “England and all civilized nations stand in deadly peril of not having enough to eat,” he said. “Our wheat-producing soil is totally unequal to the strain put upon it.”Ordinarily, agricultural soil is bolstered with fertilizer, which supplies nitrogen and other nutrients to crops. But Crookes noted that sodium-nitrate deposits in Chile—a major source of usable nitrogen for plants—would soon dwindle. He ran through several untapped sources of ammonia, including coal distillation and sewage, but none were up to the task.                                                       “There is a gleam of light amid this darkness of despondency,” Crookes told his audience. “In its free state nitrogen is one of the most abundant and pervading bodies on the face of the earth.” Scientists had tried for years to fix atmospheric nitrogen, he said, including by passing current through the air. Lightning fixes millions of tons of nitrogen each year. But putting lightning in a bottle had turned out to be expensive and difficult. “The fixation of atmospheric nitrogen, therefore, is one of the great discoveries awaiting the ingenuity of chemists,” he said. Crookes didn’t need to wait long. In 1909, the German chemist Fritz Haber demonstrated a nascent but scalable method for turning N2 into ammonia. Carl Bosch, at the chemical-and-dye company B.A.S.F., industrialized Haber’s method, and they each earned a Nobel Prize. Today, the Haber-Bosch process produces roughly two hundred million tons of ammonia a year, and has allowed the human population to reach eight billion. Without it, crops would require four times the area that they do now, covering half of Earth’s ice-free landmass. About half of the nitrogen in your body comes from the Haber-Bosch process. But its costs are enormous. The reaction happens at approximately a thousand degrees Fahrenheit and three hundred times atmospheric pressure, using between one and two per cent of the world’s energy.                                                                                                                                                Meanwhile, fertilizer runoff pollutes the environment. And yet, all the while, humble bacteria in the dirt are fixing nitrogen all day long. Recent developments in biotechnology, unimaginable in Crookes’s time, suggest a new possibility: we might be able to extract these bacteria’s mechanisms and place them inside plants. Some crops, like legumes, act as hosts for diazotrophs, which fix nitrogen from within the plant. But cereals—including wheat and rice, staple crops for many people around the world—are dependent on eating nitrogen in the surrounding soil that has already been broken down by diazotrophs or by the Haber-Bosch process. Researchers are hoping to transfer genes from diazotrophs into cereals, giving them the power to fix nitrogen. We may someday have plants that can fertilize themselves. Diazotrophs fix nitrogen using an enzyme complex called nitrogenase, which is made up of several proteins and helper molecules. The system is like a little assembly line. Essentially, one component uses ATP, an energy-carrying molecule, to funnel electrons into a second component. This component splits N2 in half, binding each atom to hydrogen taken from water and forming two molecules of ammonia. Other proteins supply these two components with metal clusters, containing iron and sometimes molybdenum. Two clusters collect and feed electrons to the third cluster, which splits the N2. The whole system, which has been likened to an anvil for splitting N2, requires at least ten to twenty genes (no one is quite sure of the minimum), though some bacteria use fifty or more.The largest hurdle is assembling and inserting the metal clusters. N2 is floating around in the air, but metal is harder to come by. “That has to come from other pathways that we’re basically begging and borrowing from,” Craig Wood, a plant synthetic biologist at C.S.I.R.O., Australia’s science agency, told me. The cluster molecules “are being made and dissolved and used all the time. It’s like an economy, and it’s tightly regulated.” Once you obtain the metal clusters, you need to find the right holes to slip them into. “This is the trickiest metalloenzyme known in nature,” Wood said.....fascinating story-read on        https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/will-plants-ever-fertilize-themselves?_sp=56fe9058-397c-4122-8d87-8cc48884e765.1707620265245  

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/                                           Who are the key players in the graphene battery market? The key players are Samsung SDI (South Korea), Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. (China), Log 9 Materials Scientific Private Limited (India), Cabot Corporation (US), Grabat Graphenano Energy (Spain), Nanotech Energy (US), Nanotek Instruments, Inc. NEW GRAPHENE EV BATTERIES HAILED AS ‘WONDER MATERIAL’ THAT COULD REVOLUTIONIZE TRANSPORTATION: ‘SCIENCE IS THE EASY PART’......It’s very light and extremely strong. “Science is the easy part. To develop a technology, you should know what products you are aiming at, and this should be coming from the industry,” graphene co-discoverer and Nobel Prize laureate Konstantin Novoselov said on the EP’s website, which notedbendable smartphones and extremely light planes as other products that could be made with graphene.   https://www.thecooldown.com/green-tech/graphene-batteries-ev-electric-cars-battery/