Rare earth elements (REE), a group of 17 metallic elements, are in nearly every piece of technology, including cell phones, televisions, computers and almost every part of a vehicle. The demand for these elements increases annually, however the supply is limited geopolitically and is mined with environmentally unsustainable practices.

Young-Shin Jun, professor of energy, environmental & chemical engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, and her team have created a proof-of-concept solution: extracting REEs from coal fly ash, a fine, powdery waste product from the combustion of coal.

“We wanted to use a greener process to extract REEs than traditionally more harmful processes,” Jun said. “Since the coal has already been used, this process is ultimately a pathway toward reduction and remediation of waste products.”

Jun and her former doctoral student, Yaguang Zhu, now a postdoctoral scholar at Princeton University, developed this novel extraction process using supercritical fluid, commonly used to decaffeinate coffee, to recover these critically needed REEs from material that would have otherwise been discarded in a landfill. Supercritical fluid is a substance at a temperature and pressure above its critical point with properties between a liquid and a gas. With more than 79 million metric tons of coal fly ash generated in the U.S. annually, Jun’s team reported that the potential value of the REEs that could be extracted from coal fly ash in the U.S. is estimated at more than $4 billion annually.

Their work, which appears in RSC Sustainability, is the first to show that common and accessible supercritical fluids, including carbon dioxide, nitrogen and air, were able to extract REEs and separate impurities very efficiently. In addition, through experiments using coal fly ash, they found that supercritical carbon dioxide decreased the concentrations of impurities in the final REE product. Ultimately, their final products contained up to 6.47% REEs, compared with 0.0234% in the initial coal fly ash source.

“The uniqueness of our work is not only using the supercritical CO₂, but also showing that supercritical air and nitrogen, with much lower temperature and pressure than those required for CO₂, can extract REE effectively,” said Jun, who leads the Environmental NanoChemistry Laboratory.

“We can use lower temperatures and pressures with nitrogen or air to extract the rare earth elements from coal fly ash, which means lower energy cost. Of course, the supercritical CO₂ works best, but supercritical air or nitrogen could do a much better job compared with traditional high temperature boiling with acids and organic solvents for REE extraction.”

Jun’s team’s extraction process involved two steps: First, metal ions in the coal fly ash, including REEs and impurities, leach from the coal fly ash and react with nitric acid to form metal nitrates; and second, the metal nitrates react with tributyl phosphate (TBP). They found that with supercritical carbon dioxide, nitrogen or air, the REEs formed complexes that could be extracted from the coal fly ash.

After extraction, their multistage stripping process collected REEs and decreased the concentration of impurities. The nitric acid and TBP used in the process can be fully recycled multiple times without sacrificing efficiency, which minimizes their disposal concerns.

Jun’s method also eliminates the need to roast raw materials at extremely high temperatures, or greater than 500 C, and the need to extract the REEs with strong acids and a large quantity of toxic organic solvents, which also become a waste product in traditional extraction processes.

“Supercritical fluid is considered as a greener solvent, is less invasive to the environment and allows us to extract REE directly from solid waste without leaching and roasting raw materials, so less energy is required for our new process, which also produces less waste,” Jun said. “We are seeking a more environmentally benign process for critical element recycling and recovery from materials previously considered to be waste.”

Earlier this month, regulators flagged power price rises in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. Like many people, you’re probably wondering how you can minimize the financial pain.

Getting rid of gas and electrifying everything in your home can save you money. Modeling by not-for-profit organization Renew showed annual bills last year for a seven-star all-electric home with solar power were between 69% (Western Sydney) and 83% (Hobart) cheaper than bills for a three-star home with gas appliances and no solar.

There are other reasons to kick the gas habit, too. As renewables form an ever-growing part of Australia’s energy mix, electrifying the home increasingly helps tackle climate change. What’s more, there are sound health reasons to get rid of gas appliances.

But where do you start? And how do you get the best bang for your buck? Here, I offer a few tips.

A quick guide to home energy use

Australian home energy use can be separated into a few categories:

• space heating and cooling
• water heating
• cooking
• vehicles
• other appliances (many of which are largely already electric).

Of the appliances that typically depend on gas, the largest component (37%) is space heating, followed by hot water (24%) and cooking (6%).

This varies between states. Victoria, for example, is particularly dependent on gas.

But the breakdown above gives some insight into the largest contributors to energy costs in the average Australian home—particularly in the cooler southern regions.

While both gas and electricity costs are rising, as they are now in most states, all-electric homes can expect lower overall increases. Analysis by Renew has shown ditching the old gas heater in favor of a split system/reverse cycle air-conditioner (without solar panels) can lead to average savings of A$546 each year in Canberra, $440 in Adelaide, $409 in Melbourne and $256 in Perth.

Heating a space with a reverse-cycle air conditioner is about four times more efficient than using natural gas. And when the electricity is generated by renewables, it can be done with zero greenhouse gas emissions.

And what about heating water? Using the existing electricity grid, the cost of using an electric heat pump is around half that of using a natural gas water heater.

The costs fall even lower if a household shifts to solar panels subsidized or financed by government, backed by a home battery providing the energy. In this case, heating costs are around a third of using gas.

So what’s the payback?

Buying new appliances costs money. So it’s important to examine the “payback” period—in other words, the length of time it takes for energy bill savings to equal the cost of the initial investment in a new appliance.

The payback period can vary depending on:

• cost and quality of the appliance
• an appliance’s energy rating
• size of the system
• for space heating, whether a split system is replacing an existing ducted system or being added on externally.

A report last year by the Climate Council calculated the approximate cost differences between higher and lower-end electric appliances. Lower-end hot water heat pumps, reverse-cycle air conditioner and induction stoves were priced around $7,818 all together, while higher-end appliances cost around $14,936 together.

Both scenarios included installation costs and $3,000 for electrical upgrades and other costs.

The payback period for low-priced appliances ranged from five years in Hobart and Canberra to 15 years in Perth and Sydney. Higher-priced appliances were in the order of eight to ten years for most cities and 12, 16 and 19 years for Melbourne, Perth and Sydney respectively.

Rolled out at scale, household electrification is also a feasible way to reduce gas demand. It may be the only practical option available to decarbonise residential energy.

As research recently suggested, so-called “green” hydrogen—made by using low-carbon electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen—is unlikely to emerge as a cheap replacement for gas boilers. And why look for a technological solution to a problem we already know how to solve?

Modeling by Environment Victoria has shown installing heat pumps for heating and cooling would reduce statewide gas use by 48 petajoules a year, compared to the relatively minimal 0.5 petajoules saved by installing induction cooktops.

At the same scale—and using a similar technology—replacing gas hot water with heat pump hot water reduces household gas use by 10 petajoules each year. That’s an enormous saving of gas.

The bigger picture for all-electric homes

Existing homes can benefit from a combination of electrification, rooftop solar and batteries. They can also benefit from energy efficiency measures such as installing insulation, stopping draughts, closing off rooms and wearing the right clothing for the season.

We can work together to speed up the transition to renewable energy and reduce the demand for gas.

Rachel Goldlust is developing a “Getting Off Gas Toolkit” for Renew. It aims to provide clear, accessible and practical advice to households on replacing gas with renewables. The public is invited to complete a survey to help design the guide.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Lufthansa’s operations were disrupted Sunday at Frankfurt airport because of technical problems, German news agency dpa reported.

Check-in systems on the airline’s website and at the counter, as well as boarding, were affected at Germany’s biggest airport, a Lufthansa spokeswoman told dpa. Some flights were delayed or would have to be canceled because of the problems.

Check-in was still possible using cellphone browsers on smartphones or tablets, and the Lufthansa app.

The technical problems were caused by external IT service providers, dpa reported. Lufthansa asked travelers to check the status of their flights and said it was working with “high-pressure” to resolve the issues.

Last month, cable damage during construction work in Frankfurt caused Lufthansa computer systems to fail, resulting in flight cancellations and delays worldwide.

Sunday’s problems came a day before a national strike in Germany is set to bring the country’s traffic to a standstill with airport, train and public transportation employees all protesting for higher salaries in a one-day walkout on Monday.

Air traffic was already canceled on Sunday at Germany’s second-biggest airport in Munich because of the upcoming strike.

© 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

On the one side are dozens of lawmakers on Capitol Hill issuing dire warnings about security breaches and possible Chinese surveillance.

On the other are some 150 million TikTok users in the U.S. who just want to be able to keep making and watching short, fun videos offering makeup tutorials and cooking lessons, among other things.

The disconnect illustrates the uphill battle that lawmakers from both sides of the aisle face in trying to convince the public that China could use TikTok as a weapon against the American people. But many users on the platform are more concerned about the possibility of the government taking away their favorite app.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said during a nearly six-hour congressional hearing Thursday that the platform has never turned over user data to the Chinese government, and wouldn’t do so if asked.

Nevertheless, lawmakers, the FBI and officials at other agencies continue to raise alarms that Chinese law compels Chinese companies like TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to fork over data to the government for whatever purposes it deems to involve national security. There’s also concern Beijing might try to push pro-China narratives or misinformation through the platform.

“I want to say this to all the teenagers out there, and TikTok influencers who think we’re just old and out of touch and don’t know what we’re talking about, trying to take your favorite app,” said Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw during the hearing. “You may not care that your data is being accessed now, but you will be one day.”

Many TikTok users reacted to the hearing by posting videos critical of lawmakers who grilled Chew and frequently cut him off from speaking. Some called a potential TikTok ban, as some lawmakers and the Biden administration has reportedly threatened, the “biggest scam” of the year. And others blamed the surge of scrutiny on the platform on another tech rival, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

But few expressed fear of possible Chinese surveillance or security breaches that lawmakers continue to amplify as they look to rein in TikTok.

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., whose district is in the heart of Silicon Valley, said he is mindful of the value that platforms like TikTok provide to young people as an outlet for creative expression and building community. “But there’s absolutely no reason that an American technology company can’t do that,” said Khanna, the top Democrat on the cyber subcommittee on House Armed Service. “America has the most innovative technology companies in the world.”

He added that Congress should move forward with a proposal that would force platform’s sale to an American company for continued access for its millions of users while “ensuring that the platform isn’t subject to Chinese propaganda or compromises people’s privacy.”

According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, two-thirds of Americans aged 13 to 17 use TikTok, and 16% of all teens say they use it almost constantly. It’s because of TikTok’s large user base that Lindsay Gorman, a former tech adviser for the Biden administration who now works as a senior fellow for emerging technologies at the German Marshall Fund, says the Biden administration will likely pursue every option short of a ban first. That would include the option for the app’s Chinese owners to divest, which the Biden administration is reportedly demanding from TikTok if it wants to avoid a nationwide ban.

TikTok itself has been trying to leverage its popularity. On Wednesday, it sent dozens of influencers to Congress to lobby against a ban. It has also ramped up a broader public relations campaign, plastering ads all over Washington that tout its promises of securing users’ data and privacy and creating a safe platform for its young users.

Some popular TikTokers who speak out against a ban are concerned—and angered—about how it might impact their personal lives. Many earn income from their videos and have inked brand partnerships to market products to their audiences—another stream of revenue that could be wiped away if the platform disappears. They would also lose the social capital that comes from having a large following on the trend-setting app.

Demetrius Fields, a standup comedian who amassed 2.8 million followers on TikTok from posting comedy sketches, said he spent a long time building his career and followership on the platform. He has one active deal with the fast fashion retailer Fashion Nova, which allows him to earn an income along with the videos he posts on TikTok.

If the app is taken away, he said building an audience on another platform would be challenging for him due to the competition to grab user attention.

“The financial implications for me would be pretty terrible,” Fields said. “I would probably have to go back to working a desk job.”

Sarah Pikhit, an 18-year-old student at Penn State University, said she used to use TikTok a lot, but started cutting back when she realized how much time she spent scrolling through videos on the app. She still uses it, but mostly to post her own content, which she says she can do on other platforms. She said she wouldn’t care if TikTok gets banned—but her friends would.

“They like the excessive scrolling,” Pikhit said.

© 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

Aaron Nichols walked past rows of kale growing on his farm, his knee-high brown rubber boots speckled with some of the richest soil on earth, and gazed with concern toward fields in the distance. Just over the horizon loomed a gigantic building of the semiconductor chipmaker Intel.

For exactly 50 years, the farms and forests that ring Oregon’s metropolitan centers have been protected from urban sprawl by the nation’s first statewide law that placed growth boundaries on cities. Cities cannot expand beyond those borders unless they make a request and justify it. Approval by cities and counties can take months or even a few years (larger expansions also need approval by the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development).

But now, a bill being considered in Oregon’s Legislature could authorize the governor to unilaterally expand those boundaries as part of Oregon’s quest to lure chip companies and provide land for them to build their factories. The measure would also provide $200 million in grants to chipmakers.

Farmers and conservationists are deeply worried about the proposal and what it will mean for a state that cherishes its open spaces.

“One of the reasons we bought our farm right here is that we knew that for 50 years we’d be farms, and everyone around us would be farms,” Nichols said. “And now we’re not so sure. Now it’s up to one decision by the governor. And that’s a scarier place to be.”

State officials and lawmakers, on the other hand, are eager to bring more semiconductor factories to Oregon while billions of dollars of federal funding to promote the industry is available.

They were stung by Intel’s decision last year to build a massive $20 billion chipmaking complex in Ohio, and not in Oregon where suitable zoned land is scarce.

Oregon has its “Silicon Forest”—a counterpoint to California’s Silicon Valley—and has been at the center of semiconductor research and production for decades. But Oregon is competing with other states to host multibillion-dollar microchip factories, called fabs. The competition heated up after Congress passed the CHIPS Act in 2022, providing $39 billion for companies constructing or expanding facilities that will manufacture semiconductors and those that will assemble, test and package the chips.

Dramatically expanding semiconductor design and manufacturing in Oregon would create tens of thousands of high-paying construction jobs and thousands of manufacturing and supply chain jobs, the Oregon Semiconductor Competitiveness Task Force, said in a report in August.

But the task force warned that Oregon needs more buildable industrial land near infrastructure, talented workers and specialized suppliers to attract and retain semiconductor businesses, and called for “urgent legislative attention.”

“This is about generational change,” Democratic state Sen. Janeen Sollman, a chief sponsor of the bill, said during a recent tour of an HP Inc. campus in Corvallis, Oregon. “This is the opportunity that students will have for their future in going into these types of jobs.”

Today, thanks to a former Republican governor, you can drive from many cities in Oregon and within minutes be in farm or ranch country, unlike many states where cities are surrounded by expanses of shopping centers and housing developments.

Tom McCall, who served as Oregon’s governor from 1967 to 1975, had successfully championed protections for Oregon’s beaches to ensure they remained public. In 1973, he urged lawmakers to push for a tough new land-use law.

“Sagebrush subdivisions, coastal ‘condomania’ and the ravenous rampage of suburbia here in the Willamette Valley all threaten to mock Oregon’s status as an environmental model of this nation” McCall said in a speech before the Legislature in 1973.

The Legislature complied, passing a bill that established the nation’s first statewide urban growth boundary policy.

Washington state and Tennessee followed Oregon’s lead. In 1982, a ballot measure called for a repeal in Oregon. McCall, who was dying of cancer, campaigned against it. Voters upheld Oregon’s land-use system by rejecting the measure two months before McCall died.

Under Oregon’s system, an urban growth boundary designates where a city expects to grow over the next 20 years. Once land is included in a UGB, it is eligible for annexation to a city. Those UGB lines are regularly expanded. From 2016 through 2021, 35 were approved, according to the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development.

But the process takes time. McMinnville, in Oregon’s fabled wine country, battled for 20 years to expand its boundary, said Robert Parker, director of strategy at the University of Oregon’s Institute for Policy Research and Engagement.

Obtaining approval can take months or years, depending on its level of controversy, said Gordon Howard, of Oregon’s land conservation department. Appeals to the courts or a state board cause further delays.

That’s too long a wait for chipmaking companies, especially those that want to take advantage of CHIPS Act funding.

“Other states offer a more streamlined approach that is more in sync with the speed of the market,” according to Oregon’s semiconductor task force, whose members included then-Gov. Kate Brown.

Under the bill, the governor may designate up to a maximum of eight sites for UGB expansion: two that exceed 500 acres (202 hectares) and six smaller sites. Any appeals go straight to the state Supreme Court.

The Oregon Farm Bureau, which represents 7,000 family farmers, said the effort should instead focus on lands already within the urban growth boundary.

“The conversion of agricultural lands into paved industrial lands is a permanent destruction of our natural and working lands,” said bureau Vice President Lauren Poor. “Once it’s paved, the soil and its ability to sequester carbon, support our food system and generate income for Oregonians is gone forever.”

Washington County, where Nichol’s farm is located, produces more clover seed crop than anywhere else in the world, thanks to its unique soil and rainy climate, said Nicole Anderson, an associate professor at Oregon State University’s Department of Crop and Soil Science.

“I hope that science and consideration of our land resources are considered when this bill is voted on,” Anderson told the Legislature’s joint committee on semiconductors on March 13.

On Friday, the ways and means committee sent the bill for a vote on the Senate floor. The Senate will consider the priority legislation this week.

“I am thrilled to see this legislation pass out of committee and look forward to seeing it through to the finish line,” said Rep. Kim Wallan, a Republican and a chief sponsor of the bill.

Parker, the land-use expert, doesn’t believe its passage would mark the start of the end of Oregon’s treasured policy.

“Will there be more challenges and bumps in the road ahead? Yeah, I think so,” Parker said. “But I feel like it is so well established in the state at this point that it has the inertia to carry it through those challenges.”

© 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

The cold blast of an air conditioner can be a welcome relief as temperatures soar, but “A/C” units require large amounts of energy and can leak potent greenhouse gases. Today, scientists report an eco-friendly alternative—a plant-based film that gets cooler when exposed to sunlight and comes in a variety of textures and bright, iridescent colors. The material could someday keep buildings, cars and other structures cool without requiring external power.

The researchers will present their results at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). ACS Spring 2023 is a hybrid meeting being held virtually and in-person March 26–30.

“To make materials that remain cooler than the air around them during the day, you need something that reflects a lot of solar light and doesn’t absorb it, which would transform energy from the light into heat,” says Silvia Vignolini, Ph.D., the project’s principal investigator. “There are only a few materials that have this property, and adding color pigments would typically undo their cooling effects,” Vignolini adds.

Passive daytime radiative cooling (PDRC) is the ability of a surface to emit its own heat into space without it being absorbed by the air or atmosphere. The result is a surface that, without using any electrical power, can become several degrees colder than the air around it. When used on buildings or other structures, materials that promote this effect can help limit the use of air conditioning and other power-intensive cooling methods.

Some paints and films currently in development can achieve PDRC, but most of them are white or have a mirrored finish, says Qingchen Shen, Ph.D., who is presenting the work at the meeting. Both Vignolini and Shen are at Cambridge University (U.K.). But a building owner who wanted to use a blue-colored PDRC paint would be out of luck—colored pigments, by definition, absorb specific wavelengths of sunlight and only reflect the colors we see, causing undesirable warming effects in the process.

But there’s a way to achieve color without the use of pigments. Soap bubbles, for example, show a prism of different colors on their surfaces. These colors result from the way light interacts with differing thicknesses of the bubble’s film, a phenomenon called structural color. Part of Vignolini’s research focuses on identifying the causes behind different types of structural colors in nature. In one case, her group found that cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs), which are derived from the cellulose found in plants, could be made into iridescent, colorful films without any added pigment.

As it turns out, cellulose is also one of the few naturally occurring materials that can promote PDRC. Vignolini learned this after hearing a talk from the first researchers to have created a cooling film material. “I thought wow, this is really amazing, and I never really thought cellulose could do this.”

In recent work, Shen and Vignolini layered colorful CNC materials with a white-colored material made from ethyl cellulose, producing a colorful bi-layered PDRC film. They made films with vibrant blue, green and red colors that, when placed under sunlight, were an average of nearly 40 F cooler than the surrounding air. A square meter of the film generated over 120 Watts of cooling power, rivaling many types of residential air conditioners. The most challenging aspect of this research, Shen says, was finding a way to make the two layers stick together—on their own, the CNC films were brittle, and the ethyl cellulose layer had to be plasma-treated to get good adhesion. The result, however, was films that were robust and could be prepared several meters at a time in a standard manufacturing line.

Since creating these first films, the researchers have been improving their aesthetic appearance. Using a method modified from approaches previously explored by the group, they’re making cellulose-based cooling films that are glittery and colorful. They’ve also adjusted the ethyl cellulose film to have different textures, like the differences between types of wood finishes used in architecture and interior design, says Shen. These changes would give people more options when incorporating PDRC effects in their homes, businesses, cars and other structures.

The researchers now plan to find ways they can make their films even more functional. According to Shen, CNC materials can be used as sensors to detect environmental pollutants or weather changes, which could be useful if combined with the cooling power of their CNC-ethyl cellulose films. For example, a cobalt-colored PDRC on a building façade in a car-dense, urban area could someday keep the building cool and incorporate detectors that would alert officials to higher levels of smog-causing molecules in the air.

Mainstream games are embracing openly queer characters—and so are many of their players and fans.

The Last of Us, the prestige HBO adaptation of the critically lauded game, has been celebrated (and review-bombed) for delivering a strong narrative featuring prominent LGBTQIA+ cast and characters.

In Left Behind, the seventh episode, the show transported us to the time the younger protagonist, Ellie, spent with her childhood friend and love interest, Riley. We also saw in the third episode, Long, Long Time, how Bill and his longtime partner Frank navigated their final moments together.

Since “The Last of Us” aired, it saw more than 22 million US domestic views within 12 days of its opening. The data suggests that there is a very large TV audience with a healthy appetite for authentic and purposeful LGBTQIA+ representation.

The interesting thing is that much of this queer representation in The Last of Us TV adaptation is lifted directly from the plot of the video game, asking whether there is a similar appetite for LGBTQIA+ representation and stories in the gaming world.

This in turn raises the question: is the gaming audience becoming more inclusive?

The growing market for queer games

Queer Games Bundle 2022 along with its Pay What You Can Edition raised more than US$216,000 for 431 queer creators. Indeed, there is a steadily growing market for queer games.

Queer games makers are resisting against public malice against the community. In February 2023, the Trans Witches are Witches bundle, which started in opposition to JK Rowling’s horrifying anti-transgender tirade, raised US$215,893 for 56 queer creators.

In 2022, we found that 90% of queer games are free or “pay what you want”.

This analysis was on itch.io, a platform where independent creators can distribute or sell their games. In March 2022, it hosted 2,499 LGBT and LGBTQIA tagged queer games. One year later, that number has risen to more than 3,376, a 35% increase. However, the ratio of free games remains.

Pride at Play

To explore more about queer games—games made by queer makers for queer folks—we curated an exhibition called Pride at Play.

Pride at Play’s selection was through an open submission whereby anyone in the world can submit their queer games. We focused on games made in Oceania and the Asia-Pacific region, reflecting the ongoing cultural and legal challenges LGBTQIA+ folks are facing in these regions.

As part of the curatorial process, we interviewed all exhibiting developers. Our interviews were akin to casual conversations, and we talked to 20 different queer designers from Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Malaysia and more.

We asked each person about their background, motivations, queer experiences, their communities, target audiences, and what it means for them to play with pride.

Queerer than ever

Hayley Gordon and Vee Hendro, who founded the game studio Storybrewers Roleplaying in Gadigal (Sydney) were among the folks we interviewed. We asked who their target audience were, and they were convinced they have connected with them.

“It’s queerer than ever. Our market, indie roleplaying games, just gets queerer every year,” they observed.

“Younger people in roleplaying are more open about their queerness as well. Games that are going into the indie space specifically are more open, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s reflections in the mainstream too.”

“I feel like I’m doing some kind of retroactive rewriting of history,” said Thomas Barrer at the Ōtautahi (Christchurch) studio Fnife Games, who makes Small Town Emo, “by making the kind of game I would have liked to see as a kid and have it work on a Game Boy”.

“Right now I have a vision of the world being more individual,” said Ignacio Bustos, lead developer at the Argentinian studio Team Spicy Bubble that created the multi-awardwinning game Queer and Chill.

“In Argentina we have a lot of young people. We’ve put value in the industry as a studio, with all those ideas of diversity and inclusion. And there are things we want to appreciate and make a place for.”

“If itch.io didn’t exist, I wouldn’t even be in gamedev at all. itch.io is where I first found small games at a scale that I could make myself,” responded npckc, a Japan-based solo game designer who created Mima and Nina’s Chocolate Workshop.

“It’s provided a space for my weird free games. It’s given me the confidence to release paid games after people donated for my free ones. It’s helped me meet other small game devs who’ve become friends who support me and whom I support as we all make our own things.”

Queer games have the potential to touch on everyday endearing moments of who we are as humans.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Lower electricity costs for consumers and more reliable clean energy could be some of the benefits of a new study by the University of Adelaide researchers who have examined how predictable solar or wind energy generation is and the impact of it on profits in the electricity market.

Ph.D. candidate Sahand Karimi-Arpanahi and Dr. Ali Pourmousavi Kani, Senior Lecturer from the University’s School of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering, have looked at different ways of achieving more predictable renewable energy with the aim of saving millions of dollars in operating costs, prevent clean energy spillage, and deliver lower-cost electricity.

“One of the biggest challenges in the renewable energy sector is being able to reliably predict the amount of power generated,” said Mr. Karimi-Arpanahi.

“Owners of solar and wind farms sell their energy to the market ahead of time before it is generated; however, there are sizable penalties if they don’t produce what they promise, which can add up to millions of dollars annually.”

“Peaks and troughs are the reality of this form of power generation, however using predictability of energy generation as part of the decision to locate a solar or wind farm means that we can minimize supply fluctuations and better plan for them.”

The team’s research, published in Patterns, analyzed six existing solar farms located in New South Wales, Australia and selected up to nine alternative sites, comparing the sites based on the current analysis parameters and when the predictability factor was also considered.

The data showed that the optimal location changed when the predictability of energy generation was considered and led to a significant increase in the potential revenue generated by the site.

Dr. Pourmousavi Kani said the findings of this paper will be significant for the energy industry in planning new solar and wind farms and public policy design.

“Researchers and practitioners in the energy sector have often overlooked this aspect, but hopefully our study will lead to change in the industry, better returns for investors, and lower prices for the customer,” he said.

“The predictability of solar energy generation is the lowest in South Australia each year from August to October while it is highest in NSW during the same period.”

“In the event of proper interconnection between the two states, the more predictable power from NSW could be used to manage the higher uncertainties in the SA power grid during that time.”

The researchers’ analysis of the fluctuations in energy output from solar farms may be applied to other applications in the energy industry.

“The average predictability of renewable generation in each state can also inform power system operators and market participants in determining the time frame for the annual maintenance of their assets, ensuring the availability of enough reserve requirements when renewable resources have lower predictability,” said Dr. Pourmousavi Kani.

ChatGPT’s impact extends beyond the education sector and is causing significant changes in other areas. The AI language model is recognized for its ability to perform various tasks, including paper writing, translation, coding, and more, all through question-and-answer-based interactions.

The AI system relies on deep learning, which requires extensive training to minimize errors, resulting in frequent data transfers between memory and processors. However, traditional digital computer systems’ von Neumann architecture separates the storage and computation of information, resulting in increased power consumption and significant delays in AI computations. Researchers have developed semiconductor technologies suitable for AI applications to address this challenge.

A research team at POSTECH, led by Professor Yoonyoung Chung (Department of Electrical Engineering, Department of Semiconductor Engineering), Professor Seyoung Kim (Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Department of Semiconductor Engineering), and Ph.D. candidate Seongmin Park (Department of Electrical Engineering), has developed a high-performance AI semiconductor device using indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO), an oxide semiconductor widely used in OLED displays.

The new device has proven to be excellent in terms of performance and power efficiency.

Efficient AI operations, such as those of ChatGPT, require computations to occur within the memory responsible for storing information. Unfortunately, previous AI semiconductor technologies were limited in meeting all the requirements, such as linear and symmetric programming and uniformity, to improve AI accuracy.

The research team sought IGZO as a key material for AI computations that could be mass-produced and provide uniformity, durability, and computing accuracy. This compound comprises four atoms in a fixed ratio of indium, gallium, zinc, and oxygen and has excellent electron mobility and leakage current properties, which have made it a backplane of the OLED display.

Using this material, the researchers developed a novel synapse device composed of two transistors interconnected through a storage node. The precise control of this node’s charging and discharging speed has enabled the AI semiconductor to meet the diverse performance metrics required for high-level performance.

Furthermore, applying synaptic devices to a large-scale AI system requires the output current of synaptic devices to be minimized. The researchers confirmed the possibility of utilizing the ultra-thin film insulators inside the transistors to control the current, making them suitable for large-scale AI.

The researchers used the newly developed synaptic device to train and classify handwritten data, achieving a high accuracy of over 98%, which verifies its potential application in high-accuracy AI systems in the future.

Professor Chung explained, “The significance of my research team’s achievement is that we overcame the limitations of conventional AI semiconductor technologies that focused solely on material development. To do this, we utilized materials already in mass production. Furthermore, Linear and symmetrical programming characteristics were obtained through a new structure using two transistors as one synaptic device. Thus, our successful development and application of this new AI semiconductor technology show great potential to improve the efficiency and accuracy of AI.”

This study was published inAdvanced Electronic Materials .

Wastewater from biorefineries that convert plants into fuel is full of organic materials that cannot be efficiently treated with conventional wastewater systems, making it costly and energy-intensive to manage.

However, those rich organic materials are an untapped source of chemical energy that can be recovered as valuable products, including biogas, a clean-burning renewable fuel.

A study by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) found that recovering resources from wastewater can substantially improve the economic and environmental sustainability of second-generation biorefineries, supporting the transition to a sustainable, plant-based biofuels and bioproducts industry.

The CABBI team designed a process that simultaneously treats wastewater and recovers biogas energy that could generate revenue for biorefineries—while lowering costs and greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventional treatment systems.

The work, published in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering, united researchers from all three CABBI themes—Feedstock Production, Conversion, and Sustainability—who are developing plant-based alternatives to petroleum for fuels and chemical products.

With a “plants as factories” model, they aim to produce biofuels, biochemicals, and foundation molecules directly in plant leaves and stems; develop unique tools, yeasts, and processing methods to convert them into high-value bioproducts, such as biodiesel, organic acids, lubricants, and alcohols; and assess the economic and ecological sustainability of CABBI feedstocks, biofuels and bioproducts, from the field to the biorefinery to the bioeconomy.

The wastewater study was led by two CABBI Sustainability researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: Jeremy Guest, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE); and Research Scientist Yalin Li of the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE).

CABBI co-authors included Vijay Singh, Conversion researcher, Deputy Director for Science & Technology, and Professor of Agricultural and Biological Engineering (ABE) at Illinois; and Feedstock Production researcher Fredy Altpeter, Professor of Agronomy at the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences at the University of Florida.

Second-generation biorefineries that process miscanthus, corn stover, or other non-food feedstocks have the potential to produce biofuels and bioproducts with much lower environmental impact than those from fossil fuels or first-generation biorefineries, which use corn and other edible crops. But these second-generation biorefineries still face financial hurdles that prevent their successful deployment in the real world.

If not properly managed, biorefineries can require a prohibitive amount of water and generate a large wastewater stream. To produce fuel and valuable biochemicals from plant biomass, biorefineries can use up to 10 liters of water per liter of biofuel produced, based on a previous CABBI study. The resulting wastewater has high concentrations of organic material—sugars, residual fermentation products, process byproducts, or other chemicals—making it difficult to reuse.

But those prior analyses are often based on conventional, low-rate wastewater treatment technologies that are expensive, energy-intensive, and require a huge physical footprint—which, depending on the size of the plant, could be equivalent to 30 football fields or more. Low-rate conventional treatment systems use large aerobic reactors, which consume large amounts of electricity for aeration, and convert the organic materials from the wastewater to carbon dioxide without creating valuable products.

The CABBI team designed a high-rate anaerobic-dominant wastewater process that largely eliminated aeration, saving electricity, and instead incorporated emerging technologies, including internal circulation and anaerobic membrane bioreactors to recover the embedded energy in the organic materials as biogas.

For their design, they used experimental data from wastewater generated by the processing of sugarcane and oilcane cultivated by the Altpeter group for CABBI’s Feedstocks to Fuels project. The process extracts the plant’s oils and then generates ethanol from plant sugars through fermentation by yeasts. The Singh group provided spent fermentation broth, after the ethanol was extracted, and collaborators from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile determined how much methane could be produced from the real samples.

Using their open-source software BioSTEAM, the researchers then simulated the integration of the new wastewater treatment process into seven biorefinery designs, covering a wide range of feedstocks and biofuels/bioproducts. Through techno-economic analysis and life cycle assessment (TEA-LCA) enabled by BioSTEAM, they found that the new process could substantially reduce the capital cost and energy usage of biorefineries, improving their financial viability and reducing their environmental impact.

The process could efficiently convert organic contaminants in biorefinery wastewater to biogas, achieving simultaneous energy recovery and wastewater treatment. It would reduce energy consumption, operating costs, and greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventional treatment systems.

“Through proper management processes, wastewater can be a potential source of revenue for biorefineries while improving the environmental sustainability of biofuels and bioproducts,” Li said.

The wastewater treatment process designed in this study can substantially improve the financial viability of second-generation biorefineries while reducing their environmental impacts, thus contributing to society’s transition to a circular bioeconomy—and CABBI’s mission to support a viable, sustainable domestic biofuels and bioproducts industry using plant biomass.