NEWS RELEASES

Farmers apply nitrogen fertilizers to crops to boost yields, feeding more people and livestock. But when there’s more fertilizer than the crop can take up, some of the excess can be converted into gaseous forms, including nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that traps nearly 300 times as much heat in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. About 70% of human-caused nitrous oxide comes from agricultural soils, so it’s vital to find ways to curb those emissions.

In a major breakthrough, a team at the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) found a new way to acccelerate plant bioengineering using robots. Researchers deployed a biofoundry – a laboratory integrating robotics, computer-aided design, and informatics – to make genetically engineered plants and used it to boost oil production in plant cells and whole plants. This fast, automated, scalable, high-throughput pipeline for plant bioengineering, or FAST-PB, can help scientists quickly improve valuable plant traits, such as increased oil production or photosynthesis, to build better bioenergy crops.

Water molecules flip their orientation before splitting into hydrogen and oxygen. These acrobatics require significant energy, leading to the reaction’s inefficiency. Researchers quantified the precise energy costs of flipping. Efficiency is significantly affected by the water’s pH levels.

A Northwestern University-led international team of scientists has, for the first time, directly observed catalysis in-action at the atomic level. In mesmerizing new videos, single atoms move and shake during a chemical reaction that removes hydrogen atoms from an alcohol molecule. By viewing the process in real time, the researchers discovered several short-lived intermediate molecules involved in the reaction as well as a previously hidden reaction pathway.

Physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University have shown that particles produced in collimated sprays called jets retain information about their origins in subatomic particle smashups.