Category Environment/Geology

Turning brewery wastewater into battery power

CU Boulder engineers have developed an innovative bio-manufacturing process that uses a biological organism cultivated in brewery wastewater to create the carbon-based materials needed to make energy storage cells. This unique pairing of breweries and batteries could set up a win-win opportunity by reducing expensive wastewater treatment costs for beer makers while providing manufacturers with a more cost-effective means of creating renewable, naturally-derived fuel cell technologies.

“Breweries use about 7 barrels of water for every barrel of beer produced,” said Tyler Huggins, CU Boulder’s Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering. “And they can’t just dump it into the sewer because it requires extra filtration...

The magnetic field and electric currents in and around Earth generate complex forces that have immeasurable impact on every day life. The field can be thought of as a huge bubble, protecting us from cosmic radiation and charged particles that bombard Earth in solar winds. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab

Oceans might not be thought of as magnetic, but they make a tiny contribution to our planet’s protective magnetic shield. Remarkably, ESA’s Swarm satellites have not only measured this extremely faint field, but have also led to new discoveries about the electrical nature of inner Earth. The magnetic field shields us from cosmic radiation and charged particles that bombard Earth from the Sun. Without it, the atmosphere as we know it would not exist, rendering life virtually impossible...

Spent Coffee Bioelastomeric Composite Foams ( 60 wt % of spent coffee powder and 40 wt % of silicone elastomer using the sugar leaching technique) for the Removal of Pb2+ and Hg2+ from Water

Scientists now report an innovative way to reduce this waste and help address another environmental problem. They have incorporated spent coffee grounds in a foam filter that can remove harmful lead and mercury from water. Restaurants, the beverage industry and people in their homes produce millions of tons of used coffee grounds every year worldwide, according to researcher Despina Fragouli.

While much of the used grounds go to landfills, some of them are applied as fertilizer, used as a biodiesel source or mixed into animal feed...

Three different tropical cyclones spinning over the western Pacific Ocean on August 7, 2006. The cyclone on the lower right has intensified into a typhoon. Credit: NASA

China, Taiwan, Japan and the Koreas will experience more violent typhoons under climate change, said researchers presenting evidence for a recent rise in storm intensity caused by ocean warming. Scientists have struggled to identify changes in the intensity and frequency of typhoons over the NW Pacific ocean—never mind trying to pinpoint a role for global warming. Contradictory trends emerge from records such as the Joint Typhoon Warming Center and Japan Meteorological Agency—the two most widely-used data sets in typhoon research, according to the US-based Wei Mei and Shang-Ping Xie...