Payal Dhar

As climate change edges from crisis to emergency, the aviation sector looks set to miss its 2050 goal of net-zero emissions. In the five years preceding the pandemic, the top four U.S. airlines—American, Delta, Southwest, and United—saw a 15 percent increase in the use of jet fuel. Despite continual improvements in engine efficiencies, that number is projected to keep rising. A glimmer of hope, however, comes from solar fuels.

When legality trumps ethics it is society’s loss. A court case in India, pitting the upstart pirate websites Sci-Hub and Libgen (Library Genesis) against the global giants of peer-reviewed publishing, could help decide a critical issue: whether scientific information should be available only for a fee, or available free to citizens who are already funding it with their tax money and to the rest of the world.

Recent advances in soft robotics have opened up possibilities for the construction of smart fibers and textiles that have a variety of mechanical, therapeutic, and wearable possibilities. These fabrics, when programmed to expand or contract through thermal, electric, fluid or other stimuli, can produce motion, deformation, or force for different functions.

Passwords are passé; biometrics are in. Or they will be, if the likes of Apple, Google and Microsoft have their way. In May, the tech giants pledged support for a biometrics-based authentication system based on FIDO standards, allowing users to sign in to their devices and accounts without a password.

Microrobotics engineers often turn to nature to inspire their builds. A group of researchers at Northwestern University have picked the peekytoe crab to build a remote-controlled microbot that is tiny enough to walk comfortably on the edge of a coin.

India is no stranger to high temperatures but they don't normally occur in March and April, when many people aren't used to dealing with extreme heat.

In recent years, scientists have been using biomimetic tissue models—reconstructed tissues designed to replicate the attributes of living tissue—to study disease and development in the human body. The heart, however, is a different story. Even though advances in stem cell research now make it easier to grow cardiac tissue, replicating a functioning human heart in a lab remains complicated.

Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 10 might be considered the longest freelance assignment in history—commissioned in 1817 by the Philharmonic Society of London and finally performed in October 2021. When the maestro died in 1827, he left behind an incredible musical legacy of nine symphonies, but the tenth existed only in the form of some random notes and scribbles. That is, until two centuries later, when historians, musicologists, composers and computer scientists came together to finish it.

[Future-Proof Freelancer Series]
In the early days of Bitcoin, freelance writer and content marketing specialist Dawn Allcot had clients who wanted to pay her in crypto. Back then, she turned them down. “In the beginning, I thought crypto was a joke,” she said. But by November 2021, Allcot wasn’t laughing anymore. The crypto market had hit an estimated value of more than $3 trillion.

[From C&EN's 2022 special issue celebrating trailblazing LGBTQ+ chemists]

Charlie Wand was always going to be a scientist. When he was 4, he would set up “experiments’’ all around the house—things like dishes of water to see which would evaporate first. His mother, a university lecturer in mathematics, “put up with me doing all sorts of things like that,” Wand says. She encouraged him, telling him anyone can do science.

[From C&EN's 2022 special issue celebrating trailblazing LGBTQ+ chemists]

For David Smith, a professor of chemistry at the University of York, the personal, political, and professional are inextricably interwoven. As an out gay man leading a team of student researchers, Smith knows that visibility is critical to diversity. If you can’t be authentic about who you are, you thrive less at work, he says, which is not conducive to belonging in the workplace or to good science.

If there is one myth that’s been dispelled over the past two years, it’s the notion that work can only happen in offices. In this brave new world of remote technologies, the possibilities offered by extended reality seem particularly promising.

A recent survey has revealed that 99 percent of computer vision engineers have had a machine learning project completely canceled due to insufficient training data. Researchers have already been looking towards synthetic data to fill this breach. In fact, Gartner foresees that by 2024, more than half of data used for AI and analytics projects will be synthetically generated.

One of the main impediments in harnessing solar energy is storage. Solar batteries work as a short-term solution, but not when it comes to long-term storage or to power, say, an entire city. A possible answer, though, might lie in oil wells. The California-based Hyperlight Energy will be piloting an installation where they plan to use existing oil wells as solar thermal wellsprings, with the stored energy being converted back to clean electricity when required.

The country says that more open access to terrestrial data will help rural farmers. More likely, will make it easier for corporations to control their land.