cement

Kogi State House of Assembly Wednesday directed ordered the shutdown of a factory of Dangote Cement Plc situated at Obajana in the north-central state, saying the asset was not legitimately acquired by the firm. Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man and the company’s majority shareholder, has been summoned to a meeting with the lawmakers, the state legislative arm said, but demanded more time to do, according to a statement seen by PREMIUM TIMES. An email seeking comments from Anthony Chiejina, the spokesperson of…

When the winner of this year’s Mercury prize is announced in London next month, Harry Styles will be nowhere to be found. Rather than rub shoulders with fellow nominees including Oscar-nominated actor Jessie Buckley and acclaimed Geordie singer-songwriter Sam Fender, the former One Direction member will be in New York, performing at Madison Square Garden as part of a critically acclaimed 15-show residency.Most artists dream of the boost in popularity that comes with a Mercury win – not to mention the accompanying £25,000…

The strength and durability of cement has made it a staple building material around the world, but engineers from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia have finally come up with a way to manufacture it at a lower cost by swapping in some recycled materials.Making concrete uses a fairly simple recipe. A binding agent, which is usually a paste-like material called portland cement, is mixed with water and aggregates: a combination of sand, rocks, and gravel. Adjusting the amount of the various ingredients…

The production of cement is a major source of carbon emissions, so the less of it that's used, the better. A new study could help, as it shows that cement can be made much stronger with the addition of material derived from waste shrimp shells.Led by Assoc. Prof. Somayeh Nassiri, scientists from Washington State University and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory started by extracting a compound known as chitin from shrimp shells that would otherwise have been discarded.Chitin is the world's second-most abundant natural…

Amid the inflection point of library digitization, publishing corporations want to reduce and redefine the role that libraries play in our society. Their suit seeks to halt loans of legally purchased and scanned books, cementing a future of extortionate and opaque licensing agreements and Netflix-like platforms to replace library cards with credit cards. If successful, they will erode the public’s last great venue to access information free from corporate or government surveillance. This dire threat to the privacy and…

Playing an indispensable role in global construction, cement contributes around seven percent of annual greenhouse gas emissions owing to its carbon-intensive production process. Scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder claim to have uncovered a greener path forward by tapping into a species of cloudy microalgae, which naturally produce limestone particles through photosynthesis and could turn buildings into carbon sinks as a result.Limestone is a key ingredient in cement, but adding it to the mix is incredibly…

Nigerian stocks crumbled to their lowest level since May 4 on Monday, with the benchmark index dropping almost 2 per cent or N550.6 billion as investors dumped huge volumes of Dangote Cement for sale, forcing the cement-maker to lose as much as one-tenth its value. Depreciation in the shares of FBN Holdings and International Breweries also compounded the plight of the market, which is yet to report a gain in the past ten days. Analysts at brokerage firm and investment bank United Capital…

A  Colorado company is channeling the industriousness of microorganisms to grow zero-carbon cement in a process that is similar to the way corals build reefs or oysters produce shells. The startup Prometheus Materials recently closed an $8 million Series A financing round that included participation by the Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund and Sofinnova Partners, a European venture capital firm. The technology is groundbreaking, but its basis has been around for billions of years, according to Loren Burnett, the company’s…

Scientists at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore (NTU Singapore) have discovered a way to make biocement from trash, making it a greener and more sustainable alternative to ordinary cement. Biocement is a type of renewable cement that binds soil into a solid block by using bacteria to induce a hardening reaction. Biocement has now been made by NTU scientists using two common waste materials — industrial carbide sludge and urea (from mammalian urine). They invented a method for creating a hard solid, or…

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore researchers have found a new way to create cement from waste.Creating renewable biocement entirely out of waste materialCement is a binder, a substance used in construction that hardens, sets, and adheres to other materials to bind them together. When sand and gravel are combined with cement, concrete is produced. Cement is classified as hydraulic or non-hydraulic, with non-hydraulic cement not setting when water is present, while hydraulic cement needs a chemical reaction…