A team from RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia; www.rmit.edu.au) and the National Institute of Technology, Warangal (Warangal, India; www.nitw.ac.in) has developed a cost-effective and eco-friendly way of producing graphene using a eucalyptus polyphenol solution extracted from eucalyptus bark. RMIT’s professor Suresh…
Nanofiltration Toray Industries, Inc. (Tokyo, Japan; www.toray.com) has created what is claimed to be the world’s highest-level nanofiltration membrane. The new membrane triples the permeation performance of conventional models while enhancing ion and organic-compound separation from aqueous solutions. In developing…
Scientists have long sought ways to take advantage of the high strength of natural silk protein in new materials, but its incorporation has been hindered by the inability to stabilize the protein in water. Now, a company known as Evolved…
Conventional plastics are difficult to recycle because end-of-life processing generally is either energy-intensive or alters the physical properties of the materials. A team of researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley, Calif.; www.lbl.gov) and the University of California at…
Chemists from the research group of Stefania Grecea at the University of Amsterdam’s (UvA; the Netherlands; www.uva.nl) Research Priority Sustainable Chemistry have devised a way to enhance the practical performance of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). By using leaves from the black…
Scientists from the University of Science and Technology of China (Hefei; https://en.ustc.edu.cn), led by professor Shu-Hong Yu, have developed a thermal insulator that mimics the structure of individual polar-bear hairs, and have scaled toward a material made of many hairs.…
Hypersaline industrial wastewater brines are difficult to treat. Current approaches for removing salt from such brines — such as evaporative distillation and reverse-osmosis (RO) — are problematic because evaporation is highly energy-intensive and RO cannot handle salt levels present in…
An international team, including staff from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (Kaist; Daejeon, South Korea; www.kaist.ac.kr), led by Kaist’s professor Jeung Ku Kang, has developed a technology to analyze the gas adsorption behavior of molecules of each…
Solar desalination Researchers at Rice University (Houston, Tex.; www.rice.edu) working on nanophotonics-enabled solar membrane distillation (NESMD) have found that concentrating sunlight on small areas of the desalination membrane leads to a non-linear improvement in performance in vapor pressure, which forces…
A modular, fuel-cell-like assembly featuring specially developed microbial communities is capable of producing pure hydrogen from a wide range of organic wastes. Developed by startup company Electro-Active Technologies (Oak Ridge, Tenn.; https://electroactive.tech), the microbial electrolysis system is now in the…