In the EU, automotive diesel contains only seven per cent biodiesel. Conventional diesel engines cannot sustain more than that. Until now.

Scientists from the universities of Kaiserslautern, Bochum and Rostock have developed a new method for producing biodiesel. The researchers chemically treated a mixture of plant oils to generate, at zero energy cost, a biofuel that can be added undiluted in modern diesel engines. Their trick: Use bioethylene to cleave the commercial rapeseed oil esters. Currently, European biofuel companies mainly produce biodiesel from rapeseed oil and methanol.

Bringing renewable power ‘by wire’ from western China to its power-hungry Eastern cities could have benefits for both local air quality and global climate change, new research has found.

The study, published today in the journal Environmental Research Letters, examined if ongoing power transmission capacity investment in China – driven largely by concerns over air pollution – could also reduce local adverse health impacts from air pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions.

The massive natural gas leak at Aliso Canyon shined a light on California’s aging natural gas infrastructure. And five years of extreme drought also exacted its toll on transmission pipelines. Now the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has been awarded $4.6 million by the California Energy Commission for two projects aimed at improving the safety and reliability of the state’s natural gas system.

Research from the University of Illinois is helping to determine the quality of protein in wheat middlings and red dog, two coproducts of the wheat milling process that can be included in diets fed to pigs and other livestock.

U.S. energy production could increase with the help of an improved carbon capture technology that use about half the energy of today's standard technologies. Emissions captured at fossil fuel power plants could in turn be used to harvest more crude by injecting it into underground oil fields.

Modern batteries power everything from cars to cell phones, but they are far from perfect – they catch fire, they perform poorly in cold weather and they have relatively short lifecycles, among other issues. Now researchers from the University of Houston have described a new class of material that addresses many of those concerns in Nature Materials.

Astronomers have released an image of a vast filament of star-forming gas, 1,200 light-years away, in the stellar nursery of the Orion Nebula.

The image shows ammonia molecules within a 50-light-year long filament detected through radio observations made with the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. It accompanies the first release of results from a research collaboration published in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement.

The anxiety over antibiotic-resistant superbugs, which are responsible for 23,000 deaths a year in the United States, is likely to grow in California, following the recent discovery by UCLA researchers of high levels of antibiotic-resistant genes in parks in four cities.

Antibiotic-resistant genes, or ARGs, lead to antibiotic-resistant bacteria. And with antibiotic resistance rapidly increasing, worldwide they are expected to kill 10 million people annually by 2050 — more than cancer.

A team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has identified a nickel oxide compound as an unconventional but promising candidate material for high-temperature superconductivity.

The team successfully synthesized single crystals of a metallic trilayer nickelate compound, a feat the researchers believe to be a first.

"It's poised for superconductivity in a way not found in other nickel oxides. We're very hopeful that all we have to do now is find the right electron concentration."

At least 156 people in Bangladesh were killed during the past week by landslides and floods caused by heavy rainfall. NASA calculated the amount of rain that has fallen using data from satellites.