The current energy crisis has re-energised conversations around the switch to renewable resources. Solar panels are one of the options, so in this month’s edition of Periodic Graphics in Chemical & Engineering News, we take a look at how these panels generate electricity and some of the present and potential materials used in them. View the full graphic on the C&EN site.
The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann “for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming”, and to Giorgio Parisi “for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.”
Today (22 April) is Earth Day. While currently, we’re somewhat preoccupied with a different crisis, the climate crisis remains a pressing concern. Nuclear power is an oft-mentioned alternative to fossil fuels but comes with the associated problem of nuclear waste. Here, Matthew Harris explains some of the storage solutions and puts the problem in perspective.
The chemical industry accounts for about 10% of the world’s energy demand and 7% of its greenhouse gas emissions. This graphic in…
On this day back in 2005, the world’s first legally-binding climate change agreement came into force. The Kyoto protocol, to which 192 countries are a party, aimed to reduce emissions of six greenhouse gases by 5.2% by 2012, relative to 1990. This graphic gives a brief overview of the agreement and the outcome of its first period.
We know what global temperatures are like now, from direct measurement around the globe. And we know quite a lot about what temperatures were like over the past few hundred years thanks to written records. But what about further back than that? How do we know what temperatures were like a thousand years ago, or even hundreds of thousands of years ago? There is, of course, no written record that far back in history – but there is a chemical record, hidden in the ice of Antartica and Greenland.
