In Illinois, Northwestern University synthetic biologists have developed a new rapid-prototyping system to accelerate the design of biological systems, reducing the time to produce sustainable biomanufacturing products from months to weeks. The new platform, called in vitro Prototyping and Rapid Optimization of Biosynthetic Enzymes (iPROBE), provides a quick and powerful design-build-test framework to discover optimal […]
In California, three new projects by scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Joint BioEnergy Institute, could make agriculture both more sustainable and more profitable by aiming to quantify and reduce the carbon intensity of agriculture, including the farming of biofuel feedstocks such as corn, soy, and sorghum, while also increasing yield. Crop-based biofuels […]
In Finland, Neste launched a new research project which aims at developing sustainable and globally scalable raw materials and technology solutions for transportation fuels and the production of chemicals and polymers. These new solutions decrease the use of crude oil and tackle climate change. The new technologies will be based on scalable renewable and circular […]
In India, the Indian Asian News Service reports that researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras have developed a microwave to produce bio-oils. The researchers used agricultural waste such as rice straw and bagasse and discarded plastics as feedstock for the technology development. They say pyrolysis technologies result in bio-oils with high oxygenate levels […]
In Massachusetts, MIT chemical engineers are working to develop a smaller-scale alternative, which they envision could be used to locally produce fertilizer for farmers in remote, rural areas, such as sub-Saharan Africa. Fertilizer is often hard to obtain in such areas because of the cost of transporting it from large manufacturing facilities. In a step […]
In Japan, scientists in Japan and the Netherlands have independently developed anaerobic soil disinfestation, also known as biological soil disinfestation or reductive soil disinfestation, to kill off pathogenic bacteria, parasitic nematodes and even weeds in soils without using pesticides. By covering the soil with plastic to cut off access to oxygen, unwanted organisms suffocate and […]
In New Mexico, New Mexico Consortium scientists looked at whether growing algae for biofuels using wastewater from different sources can lead to a higher end lipid content in the algae. Using wastewater to grow algae would be a cheaper alternative means of cultivation, and if algae grown in a certain type of wastewater has a […]
In Canada, with financial support from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s AgriScience Program, a team of researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) aims to produce durable and homogeneous pellets with consistent quality from under-utilized and low-quality biomass resources in Canada. As a member of BioFuelNet Canada (BFN), the UBC Biomass & Bioenergy Research Group […]
In Massachusetts, students and faculty from UMass’ iCons Program will construct a pilot-scale biodigester to generate useful experimental data, rationalized via mathematical models, that support a proposal for the implementation of a large-scale bioreactor on campus. The technology will improve campus sustainability by continuously recycling organic waste into useful fertilizer and biofuel. The pilot-scale biodigester […]
In Sweden, researchers at Linköping University are attempting to convert carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, to fuel using energy from sunlight. Recent results have shown that it is possible to use their technique to selectively produce methane, carbon monoxide or formic acid from carbon dioxide and water. The study has been published in ACS Nano. […]
