CO2 tagged posts

This view combines information from two instruments on a NASA Mars orbiter to map color-coded composition over the shape of the ground within the Nili Fossae plains region of Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/JHUAPL/Univ. of Arizona

How did Mars change from a world with water billions of years ago to the arid Red Planet of today. A new analysis of the largest known deposit of carbonate minerals on Mars suggests that the original Martian atmosphere may have already lost most of its CO2 by the era of valley network formation.

Carbon dioxide makes up most of the Martian atmosphere. That gas can be pulled out of the air and sequestered or pulled into the ground by chemical reactions with rocks to form carbonate minerals...

Conceptual model shows how porphyrin COFs embedded in a cathode could be used to split carbon dioxide (CO2) into carbon monoxide (CO) and oxygen for making renewable fuels and other valuable chemical products. Credit: Courtesy of Omar Yaghi, Berkeley Lab/UC Berkeley

Porphyrin CO2 catalysts have been incorporated into the sponge-like crystals of covalent organic frameworks (COFs) to create a molecular system that not only absorbs carbon dioxide, but also selectively reduces it to CO, a primary building block for a wide range of chemical products including fuels, pharmaceuticals and plastics.

With the reduction of atmospheric CO2 emissions in mind, Yaghi and his MIU group designed and developed the first COFs as a means of separating CO2 from flue gases...

Researchers are generating carbon nanofibers (above) from CO2 , removing a greenhouse gas from the air to make products. Credit: Stuart Licht, Ph.D.

Finding a technology to shift carbon dioxide, the most abundant anthropogenic greenhouse gas, from a climate change problem to a valuable commodity has long been a dream. Now, a team of chemists have developed a technology to economically convert CO2 directly into carbon nanofibers for industrial and consumer products. “Such nanofibers are used to make strong carbon composites, such as those used in the Boeing Dreamliner, as well as in high-end sports equipment, wind turbine blades and a host of other products.”

Previously, the researchers had made fertilizer and cement without emitting CO2. Licht calls his approach “diamonds from the sky...

In the northern region of Pluto’s Sputnik Planum, swirl-shaped patterns of light and dark suggest that a surface layer of exotic ices has flowed around obstacles and into depressions, much like glaciers on Earth. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

NASA’s New Horizons mission has found evidence of exotic ices flowing across Pluto’s surface, at the left edge of its bright heart-shaped area. New close-up images from the spacecraft’s Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) reveal signs of recent geologic activity, something scientists hoped to find but didn’t expect. “We’ve only seen surfaces like this on active worlds like Earth and Mars,” said mission co-investigator John Spencer of SwRI.

The new close-up images show fascinating detail within the Texas-sized plain (Sputnik Planum) ...