carbon dioxide tagged posts

Bacteria on nanowires convert sunlight, carbon dioxide and water to organic building blocks. Chemists have created a hybrid system of bacteria and nanowires that captures energy from sunlight and transfers it to the bacteria to turn carbon dioxide and water into organic molecules and oxygen. On Earth, such a biohybrid could remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. On Mars, it would provide colonists with raw material to manufacture organic compounds ranging from fuels to drugs...

Under green light and assisted by an ionic liquid, gold nanoparticles, bottom, lend electrons to convert CO2 molecules, the red and grey spheres in the center, to more complex hydrocarbon fuel molecules.

Graphic courtesy Sungju Yu, Jain Lab at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Chemists at the University of Illinois have successfully produced fuels using water, carbon dioxide and visible light through artificial photosynthesis. By converting carbon dioxide into more complex molecules like propane, green energy technology is now one step closer to using excess CO2 to store solar energy – in the form of chemical bonds – for use when the sun is not shining and in times of peak demand.

Plants use sunlight to drive chemical reactions between water and CO2 to create an...

New technique can efficiently convert CO2 from gas into solid particles of carbon. Scientists have harnessed liquid metals to turn carbon dioxide back into solid coal, in research that offers an alternative pathway for safely and permanently removing the greenhouse gas from our atmosphere. The new technique can convert CO2 back into carbon at room temperature, a process that’s efficient and scalable. A side benefit is that the carbon can hold electrical charge, becoming a supercapacitor, so it could potentially be used as a component in future vehicles.

Current technologies for carbon capture and storage focus on compressing CO2 into a liqui...

Depiction of a world completely covered with ocean.
Credit: NASA Kepler Mission/Dana Berry

Scientists challenges idea that life requires ‘Earth clone’. The conditions for life surviving on planets entirely covered in water are more fluid than previously thought, opening up the possibility that water worlds could be habitable, according to a new paper from the University of Chicago and Pennsylvania State University.

The scientific community has largely assumed that planets covered in a deep ocean would not support the cycling of minerals and gases that keeps the climate stable on Earth, and thus wouldn’t be friendly to life. But the study, published Aug...