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Category: sustainability – Page 143

Fusing Academia and Industry: The Key to Unlocking Fusion Energy’s Potential

Fusion’s success as a renewable energy depends on the creation of an industry to support it, and academia is vital to that industry’s development.

A new study suggests that universities have an essential role to fulfill in the continued growth and success of any modern high-tech industry, and especially the nascent fusion industry; however, the importance of that role is not reflected in the number of fusion-oriented faculty and educational channels currently available. Academia’s responsiveness to the birth of other modern scientific fields, such as aeronautics and nuclear fission, provides a template for the steps universities can take to enable a robust fusion industry.

Insights from Experts.

PIONEER Project: Enhancing Sea Wall Resilience in the Face of Climate-Driven Coastal Flooding

As climate change continues to ravage the planet, coastal cities are at the highest risk due to coastal flooding attributed to sea level rise. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, approximately 127 million people in the United States alone live in coastal counties, or almost 40 percent of the entire population. Therefore, steps to protect coastal communities are of the utmost importance to mitigate the long-term impacts of climate change.

Strengthening coastal defenses from rising seas levels is what a groundbreaking study known as the PIONEER project, which is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, hopes to address as scientists estimate coastal sea levels in the United States will experience the same sea level rise by 2050 that was experienced between 1920 and 2020, between 0.82 to 0.98 inches (0.25 to 0.30 meters).

“This is an interesting study because it combines, probably for the first time, the interactions for the effect of the water flooding on soils and, subsequently, on shoreline protective structures,” said Dr. Sherif Abdelaziz, who is an associate professor in the Charles E. Via, Jr. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and one of many collaborators on the PIONEER project. “We will be able to assess how all these factors interact together so we can better design our shoreline protective structures to sustain the increasing intensity of waves and floods.”

Researchers develop strategy for adding keystone species to collapsing ecosystems

There are very few animals as important to our world as honeybees. There is, of course, the delicious honey they produce, but they are also essential in maintaining food security and the biodiversity that is threatened by climate change and becoming our strongest natural defense against it.

But with the planet facing a -induced loss of , what happens when honeybees die?

New Northeastern University research, published in Communications Biology, aims to help address the impending biodiversity crisis. The researchers say they have found a new strategy for restoring lost biodiversity by, essentially, identifying the equivalent of a honeybee in different ecosystems and reintroducing it into a particular collapsing ecosystem.

MIT’s Game-Changer: Ion Irradiation in Nanoparticle Engineering for Sustainable Energy

The work demonstrates control over key properties leading to better performance.

MIT researchers and colleagues have demonstrated a way to precisely control the size, composition, and other properties of nanoparticles key to the reactions involved in a variety of clean energy and environmental technologies. They did so by leveraging ion irradiation, a technique in which beams of charged particles bombard a material.

They went on to show that nanoparticles created this way have superior performance over their conventionally made counterparts.

Metal-organic frameworks study unravels mechanism for capturing water from air

Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf and Dresden University of Technology have unraveled the water adsorption mechanism in certain microporous materials—so-called hierarchical metal-organic frameworks (MOFs)—while probing them on the atomic scale.

Discovered only about 25 years ago, their special properties quickly led to a reputation as “miracle materials”—which, as it turned out, can even harvest water from air. The researchers describe how the material achieves this in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

“These very special materials are highly porous solids made of metals or metal-oxygen clusters which are connected in a modular way by pillars of organic chemicals. This 3D arrangement leads to networks of cavities reminiscent of the pores of a kitchen sponge. It is precisely these cavities that we are interested in,” says Dr. Ahmed Attallah of HZDR´s Institute of Radiation Physics.

Photochemistry and a new catalyst could make fertilizer more sustainable

Georgia Tech engineers are working to make fertilizer more sustainable—from production to productive reuse of the runoff after application—and a pair of new studies is offering promising avenues at both ends of the process.

In one paper, researchers have unraveled how , water, carbon, and light can interact with a catalyst to produce ammonia at and pressure, a much less energy-intensive approach than current practice. The second paper describes a stable catalyst able to convert waste back into nonpolluting nitrogen that could one day be used to make new fertilizer.

Significant work remains on both processes, but the senior author on the papers, Marta Hatzell, said they’re a step toward a more sustainable cycle that still meets the needs of a growing worldwide population.