Researchers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology have unveiled a breakthrough system that could change the way we think about carbon emissions. Published in Nature Catalysis the researchers outline a system for converting captured carbon dioxide (CO₂) into industrial-grade ethylene, a commodity chemical essential to plastics, textiles, and construction. The work shows a direct path to transforming greenhouse gas emissions into valuable chemical products.
In addition to the environmental benefits, lead researcher Assistant Professor Xu Lu said key efficiencies in the system create an opportunity to turn the otherwise costly process of capturing CO2 into a profit.
“We designed and tested the system under realistic industrial conditions using captured, high-pressure CO₂,” he said. “Our results show captured carbon can be valorized into a valuable product with real economic potential.”
Today, China dominates the processing of rare earth elements, refining around 60 percent of those materials for the world. With demand for such materials forecasted to skyrocket, the Biden administration has said the situation poses national and economic security threats.
Substantial quantities of rare earth metals are sitting unused in the United States and many other parts of the world today. The catch is they’re mixed with vast quantities of toxic mining waste.
Phoenix Tailings is scaling up a process for harvesting materials, including rare earth metals and nickel, from mining waste. The company uses water and recyclable solvents to collect oxidized metal, then puts the metal into a heated molten salt mixture and applies electricity.
Semiconductor quantum dots have been emerging as one of the most ideal materials for artificial photosynthesis. Here, we report the assembled ZnS-CdS hybrid heterostructure for efficient coupling cooperative redox catalysis toward the oxidation of 1-phenylethanol to acetophenone/2,3-diphenyl-2,3-butanediol (pinacol) integrated with the reduction of protons to H2. The strong interaction and typical type-I band-position alignment between CdS quantum dots and ZnS quantum dots result in efficient separation and transfer of electron-hole pairs, thus distinctly enhancing the coupled photocatalyzed-redox activity and stability. The optimal ZnS-CdS hybrid also delivers a superior performance for various aromatic alcohol coupling photoredox reaction, and the ratio of electrons and holes consumed in such redox reaction is close to 1.0, indicating a high atom economy of cooperative coupling catalysis. In addition, by recycling the scattered light in the near field of a SiO2 sphere, the SiO2-supported ZnS-CdS (denoted as ZnS-CdS/SiO2) catalyst can further achieve a 3.5-fold higher yield than ZnS-CdS hybrid. Mechanistic research clarifies that the oxidation of 1-phenylethanol proceeds through the pivotal radical intermediates of • C(CH3)(OH)Ph. This work is expected to promote the rational design of semiconductor quantum dots-based heterostructured catalysts for coupling photoredox catalysis in organic synthesis and clean fuels production.
Five of Earth’s vital systems are close to a point of irreversible change, warns a new report released by a global network of scientists ahead of the upcoming U.N. climate change conference in Brazil.
The 2025 Global Tipping Points report updates a 2023 report to assess 25 Earth systems that human societies and economies depend on, including the stability of coral reefs,forests and ice sheets. It found at least one system has likely passed a tipping point, while four others are perilously close.
The Paris Agreement set a goal of limiting global warming to 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels by 2100. The report notes that Earth has already reached an average increase of 1.4°C (2.5°F) over the past couple decades.
Medical drugs are expensive to make and can have an adverse effect on the environment. Researchers Stefano Cucurachi and Justin Lian have developed a framework to help the health care system assess the economic and environmental sustainability of medical compounds. The research is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
With a growing and aging population, and more people living with chronic disease, health care costs are rising and the pharmaceutical industry is expanding fast. Patients and health care professionals are also beginning to wonder about the environmental impact of medicines. But information on this is lacking.
“Some sources claim 10% of all pharmaceuticals have an environmental risk, but only the smallest fraction has ever been assessed,” says Cucurachi, Associate Professor of industrial ecology.
Lead poisoning was once thought to largely be a problem of the past, as the globe gradually weaned itself off leaded gasoline in road vehicles in 2021. But has global lead pollution truly been resolved?
A new study led by Dr. Chen Mengli, a Research Fellow from the Tropical Marine Science Institute at the National University of Singapore (NUS), in collaboration with researchers from Imperial College London, University of Warwick, University of Oxford, Jadavpur University, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and University of Bristol, showed the answer is not yet: Lead exposure remains a pressing public health and economic challenge in the 21st century.
The researchers estimated that ongoing childhood lead exposure costs the world more than US$3.4 trillion in lost economic potential each year, with disproportionate impacts on low-and middle-income countries.
Artificial intelligence offers the potential to improve people’s living standards. Such advances can be approximated by changes in GDP per capita over time. Using that common measure, AI could enhance longstanding productivity gains or, alternatively, drastically alter the economy in relatively short order.
Go to https://PIAVPN.com/IsaacArthur to get 83% off from our sponsor Private Internet Access with 4 months free! A Dyson Swarm isn’t just power—it’s prosperity. See how humanity could turn a star’s energy into a solar-scale economy of trillions.
Visit our Website: http://www.isaacarthur.net. Join Nebula: https://go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur. Support us on Patreon: / isaacarthur. Support us on Subscribestar: https://www.subscribestar.com/isaac-a… Group: / 1,583,992,725,237,264 Reddit: / isaacarthur Twitter: / isaac_a_arthur on Twitter and RT our future content. SFIA Discord Server: / discord Credits: The Dyson Economy — Mega-Structures, Mega-Markets, and Mega-Wealth Produced, Narrated & Written: Isaac Arthur Editor: Jonathan Maltz Editor: Thomas Owens Graphics: Bryan Versteeg, Jeremy Jozwik, Ken York, Sergio Botero, Udo Schroeter Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images Music Courtesy of Stellardrone & Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator Chapters 0:00 Intro 0:09 The Vision of the Space Elevator 2:46 The Rope That Reaches the Sky 9:08 Manufacturing the Megastructure 12:58 Tether Design and Variants 19:57 PIA 21:52 Defects and Composites: Strength in Layers 22:48 Power and Payload 25:20 Safety, Scaling, and the Road Ahead. Facebook Group: / 1583992725237264 Reddit: / isaacarthur. Twitter: / isaac_a_arthur on Twitter and RT our future content. SFIA Discord Server: / discord. Credits: The Dyson Economy — Mega-Structures, Mega-Markets, and Mega-Wealth. Produced, Narrated & Written: Isaac Arthur. Editor: Jonathan Maltz. Editor: Thomas Owens. Graphics: Bryan Versteeg, Jeremy Jozwik, Ken York, Sergio Botero, Udo Schroeter. Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images. Music Courtesy of Stellardrone & Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator.
Chapters. 0:00 Intro. 0:09 The Vision of the Space Elevator. 2:46 The Rope That Reaches the Sky. 9:08 Manufacturing the Megastructure. 12:58 Tether Design and Variants. 19:57 PIA 21:52 Defects and Composites: Strength in Layers. 22:48 Power and Payload. 25:20 Safety, Scaling, and the Road Ahead.
Bortkiewicz graduated from the Law Faculty in 1890. In 1898 he published a book about the Poisson distribution, titled The Law of Small Numbers. [ 1 ] In this book he first noted that events with low frequency in a large population follow a Poisson distribution even when the probabilities of the events varied. It was that book that made the Prussian horse-kicking data famous. The data gave the number of soldiers killed by being kicked by a horse each year in each of 14 cavalry corps over a 20-year period. Bortkiewicz showed that those numbers followed a Poisson distribution. The book also examined data on child-suicides. Some [ 2 ] have suggested that the Poisson distribution should have been named the “Bortkiewicz distribution.”
In political economy, Bortkiewicz is important for his analysis of Karl Marx’s reproduction schema in the last two volumes of Capital. Bortkiewicz identified a transformation problem in Marx’s work. Making use of Dmitriev’s analysis of Ricardo, Bortkiewicz proved that the data used by Marx was sufficient to calculate the general profit rate and relative prices. Though Marx’s transformation procedure was not correct—because it did not calculate prices and profit rate simultaneously, but sequentially—Bortkiewicz has shown that it is possible to get the correct results using the Marxian framework, i.e. using the Marxian variables constant capital and variable capital it is possible to obtain the profit rate and the relative prices in a three-sector model. This “correction of the Marxian system” has been the great contribution of Bortkiewicz to classical and Marxian economics but it was completely unnoticed until Paul Sweezy’s 1942 book “Theory of Capital ist Development”
