A team of scientists announced they have harvested hydrogen from water in microgravity—a proof-of-principle test that may one day lead to a way to acquire fuel or other resources during a long-distance, crewed space mission.
It’s understandable that you want to be as careful as possible when handling explosive material like rocket fuel—but manufacturing the volatile mixture requires even more care. So JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, helped create a safer way to mix explosive ingredients by building a working robotic version…
This past Saturday, a tanker transporting oil from Iran to South Korea collided with a freighter about 160 miles off the coast of Shanghai. The tanker, filled with 130 tons of highly volatile condensate crude, has been burning for the past three days, raising fears of an environmental catastrophe.
Scientists recently developed a method to convert sewage into biocrude oil, so it appears that our future will quite literally be shit. According to a report from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, researchers converted poop to oil using a process called hydrothermal liquefaction. PNNL explains that hydrothermal…
In news that offers hope that human civilization won’t end up drowning in soda bottles and plastic wrap, Chinese chemists have developed a remarkably efficient method for converting polyethylene into liquid fuel. If it proves scaleable, it could make a real dent in global plastic pollution.
Is it the fuel? Not really. Even though giant passenger jets do guzzle down fuel at a ridiculous 0.67 miles per gallon—seriously, they need 1.5 gallons of jet fuel for every mile traveled—there are so many people on an airplane that the fuel cost gets split down to a much more reasonable price: a per-person fuel…
The future looks dark for coal miner Peabody. America’s biggest provider of the fossil fuel has admitted that it may have to seek bankruptcy protection.
Nepal is home to the best climbing, trekking and mountaineering on earth. But, earlier this year, it also had a massive earthquake, an avalanche on Everest and is right now subject to a “blockade” by its neighbor India. Can you still visit? Surprisingly, now may be the best time ever.
Jet airplanes load up with tens of thousands of gallons of fuel for transcontinental flights, which can lead to massive explosions in a crash or terrorist attack. But adding “molecular velcro” to fuel can dramatically reduce its volatility, or explosiveness.
In the ongoing search for a non-nuclear energy, Fukushima could find a partial answer in living, green, microalgae. And algae can help the rest of the world, too.
For the first time ever, coal has been unseated as America’s largest source of fuel to generate electricity. As of April 2015, natural gas is now number 1.
Yowza. That burns hot. Watch as a Petrogen Multi-Fuel cutting torch nicks right through a stack of metal and cuts it clean off. The cutting system can use liquid fuels of any kind, including “gasoline of any grade, “white” gas, camping fuel, and stabilizer additive fuels” and “diesel, kerosene, biodiesel”. Basically,…
The UK’s poop-powered bus is officially one fast son-of-a-bitch. As reported Friday by Ars Technica, the bus recently hit a top speed of 76.8 miles per hour at the Millbrook Proving Ground in Bedfordshire—a record for a regular service bus.
The practice of pricing fuel with a fraction of a penny is thought to have started around the 1930s. While we can’t be sure who was the first to price fuel this way, it seems to have become relatively commonplace across the United States all the sudden around the same time. So what happened? In short- taxes and the…
America has the Tesla electric car, Britain has... a poop bus. Bristol Airport now has a bus that will shuttle people to Bath city centre, powered solely by human and food waste.
Even after Deepwater Horizon we're still not ready for the next big spill—but that doesn't mean we're not trying. This weird pink plume could help.
Now here's some welcome innovation in the airline industry. Southwest Airlines announced today that it will be using biofuel on several of its flights by 2016, purchasing the blended fuel from a Colorado company that salvages "140,000 dry tons of woody biomass feedstock" per year—fallen timber from local forests…
E. coli is an exceedingly common bacteria that lives in many places including your very own gut. It's also a favorite organism for synthetic biologists looking to engineer useful microbes. By inserting just a few genes in E. coli, scientists have found they can coax the bacterium into making ready-to-use propane.
It's a problem as old as sailing itself. Ever since man set out sea, barnacles have been clinging like, well, barnacles to ships, growing into bumpy masses that slows down vessels and wastes fuel. Could the solution to this age-old dilemma be a new coat of special paint? It's not as simple as it sounds.
Astronauts have been able to drink their own (treated and filtered) urine for years, but thanks to a new technique, scientists have managed to squeeze one more benefit out of an inevitable byproduct. Now, astronauts can use their urine to keep both their bodies and their spaceships running smooth.
