The global food supply faces a range of threats including climate change, wars, pests, and diseases. Microalgae, an organism too small for the human eye to see could offer some answers. Here’s how.
Author: Horizon Magazine
This post was originally published on Horizon: the EU Research & Innovation magazine | European Commission and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.
Turning waste into energy: the race is on to reuse waste as energy in the most effective way possible. Combined heat and power is an old idea for saving fuel with a new imperative to slash emissions. Innovative furnaces based on biofuel systems will generate heat and power from waste materials with near-complete efficiency and very low emissions.
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Where are the Intermediate Black Holes?
Super-sized black holes appeared surprisingly early in the Universe and it seems every galaxy has one at its center. But how? And where are the intermediate-sized black holes (intermediate black holes)?
Before the term “digital twin” was first used twenty years ago (see notes 1), engineers at NASA were already developing ground-based replicas of spacecraft infrastructure. Today’s manufacturers are also seeing double, taking advantage of digital duplicates to better understand and predict product performance. Now the European Union (EU) scientists are looking to apply the same principles to the natural world and building more and more digital twins of the ocean.
Growing crops needs a lot of lands. Generating electricity through solar panels take up space, too. So, why not grow crops under solar panels?
Food waste has reached colossal proportions and the magnitude of the problem requires equally massive resources with the potential to supply sustainable answers. What better than the dynamic digital databases and advanced analytics we literally have access to “at our fingertips”.
By Susan Langthorp
Many future climate scenarios suggest that negative emissions will be needed to limit global warming. Researchers are now investigating how feasible this is.
By Sandrine Ceurstemont
The ability to keep food, medicines, vaccines, and our buildings cool underpins much of our modern way of life, but it is also a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. If the world is to meet its development goals and climate change targets over the coming decades, we need to rethink how we keep things cold, says Professor Toby Peters, an expert in the cold economy at the University of Birmingham in the UK.
by Richard Gray
Asteroids can pose a threat to life on Earth but are also a valuable source of resources to make fuel or water to aid deep space exploration. Devoid of geological and atmospheric processes, these space rocks provide a window onto the evolution of the solar system. But to really understand their secrets, scientists must know what’s inside them.
Trees, crops, and even organic waste can be transformed into a bewildering array of plastics to use in products ranging from single-use bags to heavy-duty aeroplane wings.
by Alex Whiting