Big Questions

Scientists experiment with burning iron as a fuel source

Sparklers produce a beautiful display of light and heat by burning metal dust, which contains iron. The recent work of Canadian and Dutch researchers suggests we can use iron as a cheap, carbon-free fuel.

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Story by Freethink

Try burning an iron metal ingot and you’ll have to wait a long time — but grind it into a powder and it will readily burst into flames. That’s how sparklers work: metal dust burning in a beautiful display of light and heat. But could we burn iron for more than fun? Could this simple material become a cheap, clean, carbon-free fuel?

In new experiments — conducted on rockets, in microgravity — Canadian and Dutch researchers are looking at ways of boosting the efficiency of burning iron, with a view to turning this abundant material — the fourth most common in the Earth’s crust, about about 5% of its mass — into an alternative energy source.

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Sachin Rawat
Sachin Rawat is a freelance science and tech writer based in Bangalore. He holds a master's degree in biotechnology. Find him on Twitter at @sachinxr.
Massive benefits of AI come with environmental and human costs. Can AI itself be part of the solution?

Generative AI has a large carbon footprint and other drawbacks. But AI can help mitigate its own harms—by plowing through mountains of data on extreme weather and human displacement.

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The recent explosion of generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and Dall-E enabled anyone with internet access to harness AI’s power for enhanced productivity, creativity, and problem-solving. With their ever-improving capabilities and expanding user base, these tools proved useful across disciplines, from the creative to the scientific.

But beneath the technological wonders of human-like conversation and creative expression lies a dirty secret—an alarming environmental and human cost. AI has an immense carbon footprint. Systems like ChatGPT take months to train in high-powered data centers, which demand huge amounts of electricity, much of which is still generated with fossil fuels, as well as water for cooling. “One of the reasons why Open AI needs investments [to the tune of] $10 billion from Microsoft is because they need to pay for all of that computation,” says Kentaro Toyama, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan. There’s also an ecological toll from mining rare minerals required for hardware and infrastructure. This environmental exploitation pollutes land, triggers natural disasters and causes large-scale human displacement. Finally, for data labeling needed to train and correct AI algorithms, the Big Data industry employs cheap and exploitative labor, often from the Global South.

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Payal Dhar
Payal is a writer based in New Delhi who has been covering science, technology, and society since 1998.
A mix of intestinal viruses could help people stay healthy longer

Based on recent research, new therapies could promote a mix of viruses in the intestines to help prevent diseases of aging.

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Story by Big Think

Our gut microbiome plays a substantial role in our health and well-being. Most research, however, focuses on bacteria, rather than the viruses that hide within them. Now, research from the University of Copenhagen, newly published in Nature Microbiology, found that people who live past age 100 have a greater diversity of bacteria-infecting viruses in their intestines than younger people. Furthermore, they found that the viruses are linked to changes in bacterial metabolism that may support mucosal integrity and resistance to pathogens.

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Peter Rogers
Dr. Peter Rogers grew up milking cows and building barns. This provided him the transferable skills necessary for a smooth transition into academic research. Three years of genetics research led to six years of immunology research, which led to a Ph.D. from Auburn University. That led to three and half years of instructional design research at Tufts University School of Medicine. His expertise includes biomedical sciences & technology, social determinants of health, bovine birthing, training & development, and cognitive psychology. He’s taught dozens of university courses, ranging from Principles of Biology to Advanced Medical Immunology. He is currently co-writing a book with his father, George Rogers, called "How to Correctly Hold a Flashlight: A Disagreement in Academic and Agricultural Perspectives."