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Category: energy – Page 41

$8.4 Billion: Enormous Cache of Rare Earth Elements Discovered in America

Coal ash in the U.S. holds substantial rare earth elements, potentially reducing dependence on imports, with ongoing research and pilot projects working to make extraction economically viable.

Coal ash, the powdery residue left after burning coal for fuel, has accumulated across the United States for decades. New research from the University of Texas at Austin reveals that this vast supply contains enough rare earth elements to significantly strengthen the nation’s reserves without the need for additional mining.

“This really exemplifies the ‘trash to treasure’ mantra,” said co-lead author Bridget Scanlon, a research professor at UT’s Bureau of Economic Geology at the Jackson School of Geosciences. “We’re basically trying to close the cycle and use waste and recover resources in the waste, while at the same time reducing environmental impacts.”

Why does nature love spirals? The link to entropy

There are moments in the history of human thought when a simple realization transforms our understanding of reality. A moment when chaos reveals itself as structure, when disorder folds into meaning, and when what seemed like an arbitrary universe unveils itself as a system governed by hidden symmetries.

The Bekenstein bound was one such revelation—an idea that whispered to us that entropy, information and gravity are not separate but rather deeply intertwined aspects of the cosmos. Jacob Bekenstein, in one of the most profound insights of modern physics, proposed that the entropy of any physical system is not limitless; it is constrained by its energy and the smallest sphere that can enclose it.

This revelation was radical: Entropy—long regarded as an abstract measure of disorder—was, in fact, a quantity deeply bound to the fabric of space and time. His bound, expressed in its simplest form, suggested that the total information that could be stored in a region of space was proportional to its energy and its size.

Hera asteroid mission spies Mars’s Deimos moon

While performing yesterday’s flyby of Mars, ESA’s Hera mission for planetary defence made the first use of its payload for scientific purposes beyond Earth and the Moon. Activating a trio of instruments, Hera imaged the surface of the red planet as well as the face of Deimos, the smaller and more mysterious of Mars’s two moons.

Launched on 7 October 2024, Hera is on its way to visit the first asteroid to have had its orbit altered by human action. By gathering close-up data about the Dimorphos asteroid, which was impacted by NASA’s DART spacecraft in 2022, Hera will help turn asteroid deflection into a well understood and potentially repeatable technique.

Hera’s 12 March flyby of Mars was an integral part of its cruise phase through deep space, carefully designed by ESA’s Flight Dynamics team. By coming as close as 5,000 km away from Mars, the planet’s gravity shifted the spacecraft’s trajectory towards its final destination, Dimorphos and the larger Didymos asteroid it orbits around. This manoeuvre shortened Hera’s journey time by many months and saved a substantial amount of fuel.

Scientists 3D-Print the Future of Particle Detection

A new technique in detector fabrication could change high-energy physics forever.

By using additive manufacturing, researchers have developed a novel way to construct plastic scintillator detectors, drastically cutting costs and build time. Their first prototype, the SuperCube, has proven capable of tracking cosmic particles, marking a milestone for 3D-printed particle physics technology.

Next-Generation Neutrino Detection

Artificial enzyme splits water more efficiently

Mankind is facing a central challenge: It must manage the transition to a sustainable and carbon dioxide-neutral energy economy.

Hydrogen is considered a promising alternative to fossil fuels. It can be produced from water using electricity. If the electricity comes from , it is called green . But it would be even more sustainable if hydrogen could be produced directly with the energy of sunlight.

In nature, light-driven water splitting takes place during photosynthesis in plants. Plants use a complex molecular apparatus for this, the so-called photosystem II. Mimicking its active center is a promising strategy for realizing the sustainable production of hydrogen. A team led by Professor Frank Würthner at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and the Center for Nanosystems Chemistry at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) is working on this.

Low-Carbon Fuels Are a Vital Step in the Energy Transition: Here’s Why

Steelmaking, for example, is considered a hard-to-abate sector due to the extremely high temperatures necessary that can only be reached by burning fuel. However, analyses suggest that the industry could reach net zero by 2050 with a combination of carbon capture, low-carbon fuels and more efficient steel use. In the short-to medium-term, low-carbon fuels present our best opportunity to press ahead with decarbonizing such hard-to-abate industries.

Complementary fuels

Switching to lower-carbon fuels is among the most economically, politically, and technologically feasible approaches to slowing carbon emissions. It offers a lower-carbon future for newly built infrastructure in East and Southeast Asia, which could otherwise become stranded assets with serious socio-economic consequences.

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