Methane tagged posts

Researchers demonstrate a way to remove the potent greenhouse gas from the exhaust of engines that burn natural gas. Today’s catalysts for removing unburnt methane from natural-gas engine exhaust are either inefficient at low, start-up temperatures or break down at higher operating temperatures. A new single-atom catalyst solves both these problems and removes 90% of the methane.

Individual palladium atoms attached to the surface of a catalyst can remove 90% of unburned methane from natural-gas engine exhaust at low temperatures, scientists reported today in the journal Nature Catalysis.

While more research needs to be done, they said, the advance in single atom catalysis has the potential to lower exhau...

The first building blocks of life on Earth may have formed thanks to eruptions from our sun, a new study finds.

A series of chemical experiments show how solar particles, colliding with gases in Earth’s early atmosphere, can form amino acids and carboxylic acids, the basic building blocks of proteins and organic life. The findings were published in the journal Life.

To understand the origins of life, many scientists try to explain how amino acids, the raw materials from which proteins and all cellular life, were formed...

Southwest Research Institute scientists combined data from NASA’s New Horizons mission with novel laboratory experiments and exospheric modeling to reveal the likely composition of the red cap on Pluto’s moon Charon and how it may have formed. This first-ever description of Charon’s dynamic methane atmosphere using new experimental data provides a fascinating glimpse into the origins of this moon’s red spot as described in two recent papers.

Astronomers have found evidence that the first exoplanet that was identified transiting its star could have migrated to a close orbit with its star from its original birthplace further away.

Analysis of the planet’s atmosphere by a team including University of Warwick scientists has identified the chemical fingerprint of a planet that formed much further away from its sun than it currently resides...