Blood that has been grown in a laboratory has been put into people in a world-first clinical trial, UK researchers say

Tiny amounts - equivalent to a couple of spoonfuls - are being tested to see how it performs inside the body.

The bulk of blood transfusions will always rely on people regularly rolling up their sleeve to donate.

But the ultimate goal is to manufacture vital, but ultra-rare, blood groups that are hard to get hold of.

These are necessary for people who depend on regular blood transfusions for conditions such as sickle cell anaemia.

The summit in Egypt could be the world’s best hope of progress on the climate issue

The latest UN climate summit - COP27 - is reckoned to be the world's best hope of progress on the climate issue.

Progress is certainly needed.

The global effort to cut emissions is "woefully inadequate" and means the world is on track for "catastrophe", the UN warned last week.

But the meeting in Sharm El-Sheikh is shaping up to be a prickly and confrontational affair.

Scientists developed iron oxide nanoparticles with water-resistant coatings. They showed that microplastics in water bind to the particles, which can then be removed with a magnet.

The paper is here.

By the end of the century, Africa will be home to 40% of the world’s population – and nowhere is this breakneck-pace development happening faster than this 600-mile stretch between Abidjan and Lagos.

>When I first started learning about climate change 15 years ago, I came to three conclusions. First, avoiding a climate disaster would be the hardest challenge people had ever faced. Second, the only way to do it was to invest aggressively in clean-energy innovation and deployment. And third, we needed to get going.

>If you are reading this over lunch on a plastic device in your climate-controlled concrete-and-steel office building that you took a bus to get to, you begin to see how more or less every aspect of our lives contributes to the problem.

High-profile initiatives to plant millions of trees are being touted by governments around the world as major contributions to fighting climate change.

But scientists say many of these projects are ill-conceived and poorly managed and often fail to grow any forests at all.

Geothermal systems carry warmth from Earth’s interior up to the surface for heating or electricity. But geothermal power plants are expensive to build, and will get even less economically viable as wind and solar power get cheaper and more plentiful. However, even as wind and solar grow, so does the need to store electricity from those temperamental sources.

A new proposal could solve those issues and bolster all three renewable technologies. The idea is simple—use advanced geothermal reservoirs to store excess wind and solar power in the form of hot water or steam, and bring up that heat when wind and solar aren’t available, to turn turbines for electricity.

>It would allow next-generation geothermal plants to break from the traditional baseload operating paradigm and earn much greater value as suppliers of wind and solar,

says Wilson Ricks, a graduate student in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University.

About 15 years ago, government incentives helped to launch a biofuel boom in the United States. Ethanol factories now consume about 130 million metric tons of corn every year. It’s about a third of the country’s total corn harvest, and growing that corn requires more than 100,000 square kilometers of land.

In addition, more than 4 million metric tons of soybean oil is turned into diesel fuel annually, and that number is growing fast.

Scientists have long warned that biofuel production on this scale involves costs: It claims land that otherwise could grow food or, alternatively, grass and trees that capture carbon from the air and provide a home for birds and other wildlife.

But government agencies, relying on the results of economic models, concluded that those costs would be modest, and that replacing gasoline with ethanol or biodiesel would help to meet greenhouse gas reduction goals.

A clean, plentiful fuel so efficient Earth's entire annual supply could fit in a swimming pool. That's the dream, but the science is there, too

The hottest place in our solar system is not the Sun, as you might think, but a machine near a south Oxfordshire village called Culham. Housed inside a vast hangar, it’s a nuclear fusion experiment called JET, or Joint European Torus.

When operating, temperatures here can reach 150 million degrees Celsius – ten times hotter than the centre of the Sun. On December 21st 2021, JET set a new record by producing 59 megajoules of sustained energy through a process known as nuclear fusion.

59 megajoules isn’t a huge amount; just enough to power three domestic tumble dryer cycles. Nevertheless, as far as humanity is concerned, proof that nuclear fusion works is a very big deal indeed.

Fusion produces energy by fusing atomic nuclei together, the opposite of what happens in all nuclear power stations, where atomic nuclei are split through nuclear fission.

Once harnessed on a commercial scale, fusion could produce so much energy from so little raw material, that it may solve all of humanity’s energy problems in one fell swoop – amongst many other things.