Tag Archive for: Carbon

Reducing Carbon Emissions With Coal

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It might seem like a paradox, but coal might hold the answer to solving carbon emission problems. The key isn’t burning it, but creating it using carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  While this has always been possible in theory, high temperatures make it difficult in practice. However, a recent paper in Nature Communications shows how a special liquid metal electrocatalyst can convert the gas into a solid form of carbon suitable for, among other things, making high-quality capacitor electrodes. The process — you can see more about it in the video below — works at room temperatures.

It isn’t that hard to extract carbon dioxide from the air, the problem is what to do with it. Storing it as a gas or a liquid is inefficient and expensive, while converting it to a solid makes it much easier to store or even reuse for practical applications.

The liquid metal catalyst is gallium-based and contains, among other things, metallic cerium nanoparticles. The liquid metal resists coking — the coating of the catalyst with the carbon material produced.

The process doesn’t produce coal lumps suitable for bad children’s stockings. Rather, it creates flakes about 3 nm thick. We’ve seen proposals for growing carbon nanofibers out of the air, but that takes high temperatures. Maybe the technology could make diamond batteries and kill two problems with one stone.

 

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Measuring your carbon footprint? There’s no app for that • The Register

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Column I recently installed an app that promised to measure my carbon footprint, then offer meaningful recommendations that could help me to reduce it.

I thought that sounded like a good enough offer that I was willing to endure a modestly nosey survey that gathered information about my lifestyle, income, and personal habits. The result was an indication that my footprint was in the “high” range.

I found that a little surprising. I did fly a lot, back when that was still a thing. But I don’t have a car, walk and bike everywhere, use renewably generated electricity, and am vegetarian.

The app informed me that 70 percent of my CO2 emissions came from an area defined simply as “purchases”.

Uh … ok? I tapped on that, to see if it might be broken down in any meaningful way, only to find that my rating was an estimate drawn from averages that may or may not have reflected my personal circumstances.

I’d like to believe that I tread lightly on the environment, though I know as a middle-class Australian that’s unlikely to be the case. In the absence of any meaningful information, how can I make changes? I could follow the app’s suggestions – though these seem to be more broad brushstrokes than highly targeted activities.

That leaves me little wiser than before I launched the app.

It’s not really the app’s fault. It’s doing the best it can to offer advice in an environment that almost completely lacks auditability, transparency, or solid sources of data.

When I buy an apple at the supermarket, I have no idea how much carbon was burnt bringing it to me, nor do I have any obvious way to learn this. That’s broadly true for almost everything – although here in Australia automakers are required by law to let you know how many litres of petrol it will burn to take you 100 kilometres (each litre of petrol adds around 2.2 kilograms of carbon…

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RSA Conference: Carbon Black to introduce Streaming Prevention

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Carbon Black is introducing at RSA Conference 2017 next week a new way for its gear to detect attacks that don’t make their way into networks via viruses or malicious files that other endpoint security software can detect.

Called Streaming Prevention, the technology can find both malware and non-malware attacks by analyzing endpoint activities in the context of the sequences in which they unfold.

It does this by having endpoint agents tag events as they occur and streaming them to Carbon Black’s analysis engine in the cloud. There the engine determines whether it falls in a sequence of events that add up to an attack and tells the endpoint to block activity that is deemed malicious.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Network World Tim Greene

Carbon Black buys Confer for next-gen anti-virus

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Carbon Black has bought Confer to boost its protection for network endpoints using a behavioral form of antivirus combined with cloud analysis of threats rather than traditional signature-based software.

Called Cb Defense, the renamed Confer product uses behavior-based techniques to prevent attacks from getting started and blends in attack-detection and response as a way to halt ongoing attacks.

These are supported by analytics based in the cloud that help detect malwareless attacks that employ legitimate tools that are built into operating systems as a way to stay below the radar of defenses that use hashes and signatures to detect.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Network World Tim Greene