Category: Top Stories

Edible cutlery, organic burial, spider silk for football helmets & hearing aids, bellybutton bacteria, Elon Musk biobased surfboards: The Digest’s Top 10 Innovations for the week of August 8th

August 9, 2018 | Jim Lane

The pace of invention and change is just too strong, we’ve realized, to highlight annual or even quarterly or monthly rankings and summaries of significant product and service advances. For now, we’re going to be tracking these on a weekly basis to keep pace with the changes. Here are the top innovations for the week […]

Oil’s relentless price climb brings advanced biofuels back in vogue

August 9, 2018 | Jim Lane

For several years now we have seen a significant number of players pivoting from biofuels towards smaller but higher-value markets in chemicals, nutrition, nutraceuticals, pharma, materials, flavorings, fragrances, cosmetics and more. We’ve reported on the proliferation of applications both in the Digest and in What’s Nuu? and indeed there’s been so much that’s Nuu, it’s […]

Cannabis, canola, solids, hog fuel, wheat: what’s new with food and feedstocks?

August 7, 2018 | Jim Lane

We eat it, we wear it, we burn it, we glue it, we live in it and more. Feedstock that is — crops and residues of the municipal, industrial, agricultural and forest type. We’ve been reporting all the innovations in making new stuff from this old stuff. But who’s doing what to make old stuff […]

A factory no bigger than a molecule, now producing fuels, chemicals and materials

August 6, 2018 | Jim Lane

A team from Switzerland has come up with a black box the size of a molecule, and inside that box they can generate the precursors for fuels, pesticides and face creams with astonishing yields and simplicity. Specifically, they are making compounds that within the 50,000-molecule group known as terpenes — and if you’ve smelled a […]

Plastics proliferation transitioning to bioplastics boost

August 5, 2018 | admin

IHS Markit published a plastics report saying that the market value for biodegradable polymers exceeds $1 billion and will rise sharply by 2023 thanks to increased plastic regulations and bans in Western Europe. But it’s not just Europe that we are seeing bans on plastic. Multinational companies like Kraft, Starbucks, McDonalds, Marriott, Disney and more […]

The Top 10 advances in renewable butanol: what’s speeding up, where are the slow-downs?

August 2, 2018 | Jim Lane

From Portugal comes the news that SilicoLife was awarded with a SME instrument phase 1 grant for the commercial evaluation of its BUTANOVA technology, a new biological process to produce n-butanol. BUTANOVA technology consists on a novel and proprietary metabolic pathway designed computationally by SilicoLife and implemented and experimentally validated in collaboration with University of […]

The Digest’s Top 10 Innovations for the week of August 2nd: waste plastics for fuels and sneakers, eggs without the chicken, 3D printing, algae-based ketchup packaging, green funerals, biodegradable grills

August 1, 2018 | Jim Lane

Carbon Capture, Solar Fuels, Fossil Bubble

July 31, 2018 | Jim Lane

In Spain, BIOCON-CO2, a new €7 million EU Horizon 2020-funded research project, has recently kicked-off with intentions of supporting EU leadership in carbon dioxide (CO2) re-use technologies. BIOCON-CO2 aims to re-use excess CO2 produced from the iron, steel, cement and electric power industries to create value-added chemicals and plastics. This will be achieved by developing […]

The 40 Hottest Transformative Technologies in the Bioeconomy: Nominations open

July 30, 2018 | Jim Lane

Who will be #1? who will get your vote? In Florida, The Digest announced the official opening of nominations for the 40 Hottest Transformative Technologies in the Advanced Bioeconomy. Nominate your favorite technologies here. Labs, here’s your chance to shine Whether the development is at a commercial company, academic lab, private or national lab, a […]

“There’s no place like home” grown sorghum

July 29, 2018 | admin

Sorghum sights are set high with EPA approval and recent genetic improvements The next time they re-make the Wizard of Oz movie, you might just see sorghum growing in the fields along the yellow brick road, thanks to sorghum’s big win last week when the U.S. EPA opened up pathways for sorghum oil to become […]

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