gases

November 24, 20233 min readHeat pumps are ubiquitous in the form of air conditioners. Scientists just invented one that avoids harmful refrigerant gasesBy Davide Castelvecchi & Nature magazineAir conditioners around the world compress and vaporize environmentally damaging gases to cool and heat air. But a new heat pump technology could change all that. The use of environmentally damaging gases in air conditioners and refrigerators could become redundant if a new kind of heat pump lives up to its promise. A prototype,…

Two new studies associated with the James Webb Space Telescope’s Early Release Science program have been published, and both have to do with Jupiter’s moons, namely Ganymede and Io.Webb Telescope Images the Pillars of CreationThe first study, led by astronomer Samantha Trumbo from Cornell University and published in Science Advances, presents a fascinating first—the unprecedented detection of hydrogen peroxide on Ganymede. The second study, published in JGR: Planets, reveals another neat finding—sulfurous fumes,…

The Taunus Observatory on the mountain Kleiner Feldberg near Frankfurt am Main houses the new "Medusa" device, which detects climate-relevant F-gases. Credit: Markus Bernards for Goethe University Frankfurt In the past, they were found in every refrigerator and aerosol until it was discovered that they had ripped a hole in the ozone layer protecting Earth's atmosphere: chlorofluorocarbons, in short CFCs.…

Astronomers have discovered an ancient stellar remnant that keeps its light elements separate, in a strange first.Threads Needs These Five Missing Features to Be a Twitter KillerThe object is a white dwarf, an ancient core of a dead star. White dwarfs are small (hence their name, obviously), clocking in at about the size of Earth, but with a mass similar to that of the Sun. Under their intense gravity, heavier elements sink towards the center of the dwarf, while lighter elements float nearer to its surface.The recently…

Ever since neutron stars were discovered, researchers have been using their unusual properties to probe our universe. The superdense remnants of stellar explosions, neutron stars pack a mass greater than the Sun’s into a ball about as wide as San Francisco. A single cup of this star matter would weigh about as much as Mount Everest. These odd celestial bodies could alert us to distant disturbances in the fabric of spacetime, teach us about the formation of elements, and unlock the secrets of how gravity and particle…

Texas could add tens of thousands of jobs if the state seriously commits itself to driving down its methane emissions, finds a report from the Texas Climate Jobs Project released Wednesday. But state leadership has thus far refused funding from the federal government for anti-methane measures.Prime Day Ain't That 'Green'Methane lasts for less time in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, but it’s much more intenseand can do some serious damage while it’s around. As we increasingly run out of time to right the ship and keep…

Map view (left) and cross-section (right) of the GZ borehole and 8 monitoring boreholes with locations of gas samplers. Yellow zones are zones of sand and epoxy which hold the gas sniffers. Gray zones are grout. Not to scale, grout layers are 5-7 times the height of the sand/epoxy layers. Credit: Geofluids (2021). DOI: 10.1155/2021/6697819 Geoscientists have detected specific gases being released from fractured rocks in real…

Credit: University de Liege A new scientific study by researchers from the University of Liège (Belgium) shows that rivers in the Andean mountains contribute 35% and 72% of riverine emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2 ) and methane (CH4 ) in the Amazon basin, the world's largest river. This study is published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. …

The rapidly rising number of space launches could pose a new threat to Earth’s critical ozone layer, according to a growing body of scientific research.Our ozone layer is often touted as a global environmental success story. Since the 1987 signing of the Montreal Protocol—an international treaty to protect the ozone—countries around the world have rallied to stop producing and emitting the chemical compounds that contributed to the dramatic thinning of the ozone layer above Antarctica. Despite a brief backslide in the…

Figure 1. Schematic diagram of the GMI-II's detection principle. Credit: Wang Qiansheng To meet the demand for greenhouse gas detection, a novel phase correction algorithm of interferometric data for the optimally designed Greenhouse gases Monitoring Instrument-II (GMI-II) has been developed by researchers led by Prof. Xiong Wei from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).…