How your favorite airline can slash its colossal carbon emissions
Courtesy photo.
If the airline industry were its own country, it would emit more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air than nearly every nation on Earth. To quell these prodigious emissions, and to prepare for a future where already-booming air travel is expected to triple by 2045, major airlines recently announced lofty designs to slash their carbon emissions.
But, critically, airlines might want to ramp up investment in fuels that don’t require fracking new oil from the planet. These fuels, called biofuels because they’re commonly made from crops or plant waste, won’t add any new carbon to Earth’s already skyrocketing carbon-dioxide levels. “Instead of releasing carbon as CO2 that’s been in the earth for billions of years, this is from a plant,” said Andrew Sutton, who works on the Chemical Energy Storage Team at Los Alamos National Laboratory. (Sutton is researching ways to make current jet fuels more efficient.) (Full story)
Expedition drifts in the Arctic ice to study climate
Members of the Atmospheric Radiation
Measurement installation team stand in
front of the icebreaker R/V Polarstern.
Courtesy Photo.
After years of planning and days of travel, a team of scientists and technicians from Los Alamos National Laboratory at last have made it to the top of the world, that snow desert known as the Arctic.
As the team emerges from the comfort of the research ship R/V Polarstern, they are struck by the unforgiving cold, which during winter reaches minus-58 degrees. This is the place of the midnight sun and polar night, where it’s often difficult to discern land from water because of the ice and snow that sit above it, and where polar bears and arctic foxes are the solitary creatures.
Despite the destitute location and uninviting climate of the Arctic, people have always been drawn to this desolate place. Explorations go as far back as 325 B.C., when a Greek expedition led by Pytheas made it to the frozen sea while searching for tin.
Countless other expeditions have followed. Lately, humanity has come to the Arctic to seek answers to how and why the Earth’s climate works the way it does. For example, five years ago Russian scientists used drift stations — research camps aboard large floating slabs of ice — to study the nature of climate and how it has evolved on Earth.
Such scientific work has the potential to unravel the Arctic’s secrets regarding how it responds to a changing environment, and critically, how it affects weather patterns in the rest of our world. (Full story)
Interplanetary rock star: LANL scientist Nina Lanza uses the Mars rover and its ChemCam laser to study the geology of the Red Planet
Nina Lanza, a scientist at LANL, traveled to
Antarctica a few years ago to locate and
recover meteorites.
A trip to a Boston planetarium at age 7 to see Halley’s Comet set the trajectory of Nina Lanza’s life.
The Mars rover and Los Alamos National Laboratory planetary geologist said she came from a family that loved exploring the natural world. Lanza grew up in Boston, and her parents took her to the planetarium where she attended a lecture and then was given the opportunity to look through a telescope.
“There were all these amazing things,” she said. “I realized that’s what I wanted to do, study these things.”
Lanza is part of the lab’s almost all-woman team that controls the ChemCam instrument that is attached to the Curiosity rover. The instrument shoots rocks with a laser and then LANL team analyzes them. (Full story)
Electrically pumped quantum-dot LED could lead to laser-diode version
Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have incorporated colloidal quantum dots into a new type of electrically pumped LED containing an integrated optical resonator, which also allows the device, when optically pumped, to function as a laser.
The device, which emits at 618 nm with a quantum yield of about 80%, is a step toward mass-producible electrically pumped CQD lasers. This novel, dual-function device opens a path to versatile, easy-to-fabricate laser diodes—because the output wavelength can be tailored by changing the size of the CQDs, the technology can potentially result in lasers with wavelengths anywhere within a broad spectrum. (Full story)
