News by Subject Biology

Surplus industrial carbon dioxide creates an opportunity to convert waste into a valuable commodity. Excess CO2 can be a feedstock for chemicals typically derived from fossil fuels, but the process is energy-intensive and expensive. University of Illinois chemical engineers have assessed the technical and economic feasibility of a new electrolysis technology that uses a cheap biofuel byproduct to reduce the energy consumption of the waste-to-value process by 53 percent.

Nine years ago tomorrow -- April 20, 2010 -- crude oil began leaking from the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig into the Gulf of Mexico in what turned out to be the largest marine oil spill in history. A long-term study suggests the oil is still affecting the salt marshes of the Gulf Coast, and reveals the key role that marsh grasses play in the overall recovery of these important coastal wetlands.

Lithium-ion batteries are expected to have a global market value of $47 billion by 2023, but their use in heavy-duty applications such as electric vehicles is limited due to factors such as lengthy charge and discharge cycles. UVA Engineering researchers working at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are examining how the lithium moves in battery electrodes, important in designing batteries that charge and discharge faster.

A low-tech problem troubles the high-tech world of digital pathology imaging: There are no reliable standards for the quality of digitized tissue slides comprising the source material for computers reading and analyzing vast numbers of images. Poor-quality slides get mixed in with accurate slides, potentially confusing a computer program trying to learn what a cancerous cell looks like. Researchers from Case Western Reserve University are trying to fix this, sharing an open-source quality control standard.

Researchers from Sweden and Finland have developed the interactive web-based Maladaptation Game, which can be used to better understand how Nordic farmers make decisions regarding environmental changes and how they negotiate the negative impacts of potentially damaging decisions.