The world is facing a global energy crisis as CO2 levels in the atmosphere continue to increase at an alarming rate. What if CO2 could be converted into energy-rich products that sustainably benefit people and protect the planet? Enter bacteria. Society has a complicated relationship with bacteria. It is acknowledged for aiding digestion and helping produce food […]
Focussing sunlight with tiny particles could improve the sustainability of the world’s most energy-hungry reactions. Making the chemicals that we need for industries like farming and pharmaceuticals uses nearly 5% of the world’s energy, and most of it comes from fossil fuels that emit CO2 when they’re used. Many of these processes already use catalysts, […]
When you send electricity through a wire, it heats up and wastes energy – imagine your phone getting hot after watching videos or playing too many games. This happens because most materials have resistance, which pushes against the electricity. Around 8.5% of your electricity is wasted before it even reaches your house because of resistance. […]
Being able to control and measure electrons is a vital part of the modern world; it’s the basis of electronics after all. However, electrons also play an incredibly important part in measuring the world around us. By firing electrons at an object or capturing the electrons that escape from it we can learn an enormous […]
Down on Earth, solar cells continue growing in the renewable energy sector. Up in space, solar cells are widely used to power satellites and other spacecraft. As we move towards a greener future and as space technologies keep growing, new solar cell designs are being studied to make them better and more efficient at generating […]
For the past 60 years, the performance of computers has doubled every 18 months – your smartphone today has 100,000 times more computing power than the computer used to fly the Apollo 11 mission to the moon in 1969! But this trend, known as Moore’s Law, is reaching the end of the line. The transistors […]
Magnetism is all around us. Medical imaging inside the body, creating clean electricity with turbines, storing data on computers – all of these things use magnetism at their core to function. However, it can be difficult to improve these processes, and a large reason for that difficulty is the fact that magnetism is ‘invisible’, but […]
While advances in cancer therapy in recent years have improved the prognosis of many forms of brain cancer, there are still types of brain tumours where conventional therapy is not successful. Traditionally, there are three ways to treat a brain tumour: The (partial) removal of the tumour by a surgeon, the destruction of tumour tissue […]
Despite being curable and preventable, Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the Top 10 causes of death worldwide and the leading cause of death from a single infectious agent according to the World Health Organization. Currently, the TB epidemic is fueled by lack of an efficient and affordable diagnostic test. In order to ensure proper treatment, it’s […]
Can we unlock new space missions by designing better space power technologies? Can more radiation tolerant solar cells help us find evidence of extra-terrestrial life? Spacecraft are predominantly powered by photovoltaic systems. Traditional fuels are heavy and therefore costly and radioactive materials capable of powering spacecraft are in limited supply. Outside of the Earth’s atmosphere, […]