Out of Thin Air

SEQUESTRATION

Vox, the popular United States media site, had an insightful column this past September about what the world needs to do if it has any hope of keeping planetary warming in check.  Step one: kick fossil fuels off the power grid. Step two: Electrify everything. The idea is to take anything that currently relies on...

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Silicon Renaissance

NANOTECHNOLOGY

Can silicon detect and fight cancer, turn a greenhouse gas like carbon dioxide into a fuel and form an inexpensive way to separate hydrogen from water? Is it possible to use the second-most abundant element in the Earth’s crust to create superior batteries for electric cars, low-cost lasers and literally dirt-cheap methods of detecting explosives?

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Cornfield of Dreams

AGRICULTURAL CHEMISTRY

Anton Korenevski was doing laboratory work one night as part of a study into how bacteria stick to surfaces when he spotted something unusual. A post-doctoral researcher at the University of Guelph, Korenevski had just performed a complex chemical procedure and noticed what project leader John Dutcher describes as “a waste product that looked kind...

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Battle of the nanotubes

MATERIALS

When one thinks of the word “nanotube,” the other word that’s likely to come to mind is “carbon.” Even a Google search reveals this bias. It’s easy to understand why. Since 1991, when carbon nanotubes emerged most prominently on the scientific scene, they have captured our collective imagination. These nano-sized cylinders of strictly organized carbon...

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Waxing poetic about plastics

MATERIALS CHEMISTRY

It’s in your car tires and the roads you drive on. It bonds the wood particles in your desk. It coats the apples and fancy cheeses you eat for lunch. Wear lipstick? It’s in that, too. It’s also scribbled in the pages of your child’s colouring book and helps set a romantic tone for dinner...

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Pure pursuit

ENVIRONMENTAL CHEMISTRY

If it’s unfair to judge a book by its cover, it’s equally unfair to judge a promising new technology by the ho-hum building housing it. When first arriving at Xogen Technologies’ wastewater...

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The power of spin

INNOVATION

There has been so much thought put into anticipating, avoiding, and destroying tornadoes that I became quite intrigued in early 2007 when I received the following...

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