After long delays caused by storms and rough seas, NASA on Sunday launched a rocket into space carrying an experiment built by students at Utah State University. The 43-foot-tall sounding rocket launched at 6:51 a.m. from Wallops Flight Facility on the eastern shore of Virginia. The vehicle flew in space for approximately seven minutes and […]
Green Light: Biochemists Describe Light-Driven Conversion of Greenhouse Gas to Fuel
By way of a light-driven bacterium, Utah State University biochemists are a step closer to cleanly converting harmful carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion into usable fuels. Using the phototropic bacterium Rhodopseudomonas palustris as a biocatalyst, the scientists generated methane from carbon dioxide in one enzymatic step. “It’s a baby step, but it’s also a big […]
Chemists Shed Light on Global Energy, Food Supply Challenge
All living things require nitrogen for survival, but the world depends on only two known processes to break nitrogen’s ultra-strong bonds to allow conversion to a form humans, animals and plants can consume. One is a natural, bacterial process on which farmers have relied since the dawn of agriculture. The other is the century-old Haber-Bösch […]