Sustainable and affordable building materials are therefore more in demand than ever. This is where the “ZEROES” project comes in: The project partners Betonwerk Büscher, Rohstoffbauwerke and project management Fraunhofer UMSICHT are pursuing the goal of reducing CO2 emissions in the production of mineral building materials. A central approach is the use of carbonates as binders or fillers in concrete and sand-lime bricks. The project partners met on July 3, 2024 for the official kick-off at Fraunhofer UMSICHT in Oberhausen….
… extracting metals with microorganisms. TUBAF develops innovative process for the bioleaching of copper, indium and zinc. Microorganisms work in an underground bioreactor and convert ores or residual materials from mining into the valuable metals copper, indium and zinc. Innovative membrane filters then filter the valuable metals from the resulting process water. In a pilot plant of a current mining project near Pöhla in Saxony, a team from the TU Bergakademie Freiberg wants to combine both procedures into an innovative…
… offers therapeutic potential. A team led by Prof. Dr. Han Sun from the Leibniz-Forschungsinstitut für Molekulare Pharmakologie (FMP) has elucidated an important mechanism in the function of TREK channels at an atomic level. The results, published in the journal “Nature Communications,” could facilitate the development of therapeutics for diseases such as ischemia, epilepsy, and depression. The human body is composed of cells where various processes occur constantly. Some of these processes take place across the cell membrane through potassium…
Female mammals – including humans – are born with all of their egg cells. Of a woman’s one to two million egg cells, about 400 mature before menopause and can be fertilized. Some egg cells therefore survive for several decades – and need to remain functional over this long time. Extremely long-lived proteins in the ovary seem to play an important role in this, as teams of researchers from Göttingen (Germany) have now discovered in experiments with mice. These long-lived…
The possibility of hydrogen-powered flight means greater opportunities for fossil-free travel, and the technological advances to make this happen are moving fast. New studies from Chalmers University of Technology, in Sweden, show that almost all air travel within a 750-mile radius (1200 km) could be made with hydrogen-powered aircraft by 2045, and with a novel heat exchanger currently in development, this range could be even further. “If everything falls into place, the commercialisation of hydrogen flight can go really…
Ice in nature is surrounded by liquid most of the time, and therefore it is key to understand how ice and liquid interact. A Kobe University and Institute for Molecular Science study could now for the first time directly observe the precise shape of ice at the interface between ice and liquid – by using antifreeze and a refrigerated microscope. When we slide on ice, when snowflakes form, when we lick ice cream, the surface of the ice is always covered…
A global research team led by Texas Engineers has developed a way to blast the molecules in plastics and other materials with a laser to break them down into their smallest parts for future reuse. The discovery, which involves laying these materials on top of two-dimensional materials called transition metal dichalcogenides and then lighting them up, has the potential to improve how we dispose of plastics that are nearly impossible to break down with today’s technologies. “By harnessing these unique…
Researchers at the Vehicle Safety Institute will team up with national and international partners to make batteries safer, extend their service life and make them more sustainable. The FFG, the provinces Styria and Upper Austria as well as companies are investing about 19 million euros in total. Jörg Moser (left) and Christian Ellersdorfer from the Vehicle Safety Institute at TU Graz at a test bench of the Battery Safety Center Graz. Foto: Helmut Lunghammer / TU Graz It is a…
Awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, quantum dots have a wide variety of applications ranging from displays and LED lights to chemical reaction catalysis and bioimaging. These semiconductor nanocrystals are so small—on the order of nanometers—that their properties, such as color, are size dependent, and they start to exhibit quantum properties. This technology has been really well developed, but only in the visible spectrum, leaving untapped opportunities for technologies in both the ultraviolet and infrared regions of the electromagnetic…
Certain types of light have proven to be an effective, minimally invasive treatment for cancers located on or near the skin when combined with a light-activated drug. But deep-seated cancers, surrounded by tissue, blood and bone, have been beyond the reach of light’s therapeutic effects. To bring light’s benefits to these harder-to-access cancers, engineers and scientists at the University of Notre Dame have devised a wireless LED device that can be implanted. This device, when combined with a light-sensitive dye,…
A international team of astronomers led by Université de Montréal has made an exciting discovery about the temperate exoplanet LHS 1140 b: it could be a promising “super-Earth” covered in ice or water. When the exoplanet LHS 1140 b was first discovered, astronomers speculated that it might be a mini-Neptune: an essentially gaseous planet, but very small in size compared to Neptune. But after analyzing data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) collected in December 2023 – combined with…
Recently, the team led by Prof. WANG Rujing and WANG Liusan from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, established a Learnable Full-frequency Transformer Dual Generative Adversarial Network (LFT-DGAN) to address the issue of underwater image quality degradation caused by various interferences. The research results were published in Frontiers in Marine Science. Underwater image enhancement technology aims to optimize the quality of underwater images and meet the diverse needs of marine scientific research, underwater robots and…
According to research published in Energy Storage Materials recently, a team led by Prof. HU Linhua from Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of Chinese Academy of Sciences proposed a general principle through evaluating the highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) energy level of molecules and employed it as a critical descriptor to select non-sacrificial anionic surfactant electrolyte additives for stabilizing Zn anodes, realizing sustainable regulation effect with inhibited Zn dendrite growth and side-reactions. “That means the anionic surfactant electrolyte additive sodium dodecyl benzene…
Every living cell transcribes DNA into RNA. This process begins when an enzyme called RNA polymerase (RNAP) clamps onto DNA. Within a few hundred milliseconds, the DNA double helix unwinds to form a node known as the transcription bubble, so that one exposed DNA strand can be copied into a complementary RNA strand. How RNAP accomplishes this feat is largely unknown. A snapshot of RNAP in the act of opening that bubble would provide a wealth of information, but the…
New findings open up possibilities for sustainable color technologies. An international team of researchers of the Cluster of Excellence ‘Balance of the Microverse’ at the University of Jena has investigated the mechanism that makes some types of bacteria reflect light without using pigments. The researchers were interested in the genes responsible and discovered important ecological connections. These findings were published in the current issue of the renowned journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The iridescent colors known…
Is it possible to create a new class of materials from very different substances using the “one-pot synthesis” approach? Chemists at the University of Konstanz explain how they enable the synthesis of such novel materials. People have long dreamt of developing materials to circumvent the challenges of daily life. Ideally, one could capitalize on a combination of the features of different materials, profiting from their advantages while avoiding the disadvantages. In chemistry, this concept has been applied to hybrid materials,…
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