Photo-pyrolysis means splitting molecules into smaller gaseous and solid molecules via heat generated from flashes of intense white light. Through this process, scientists are able to turn banana peels into hydrogen, hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, and biochar. Before photo-pyrolysis, banana peels were dried at 105°C for 24 hours to remove moisture. Afterwards, they were ground into a fine powder and exposed to the flash of a xenon lamp. This process yielded 100 litres of hydrogen per kilogram of banana peel in just 14.5 milliseconds. Read full article here
Oddities
The Curious Case of the Ancient Brain
In 2008, archaeologists examining the University of York discovered something strange: the decapitated head of an Iron Age man and his very shrivelled but very much intact brain. How a centuries-old brain was preserved is still unknown, but research suggests that it could have been because of brain diseases like dementia. The Yorkshire man’s brain’s proteins were bunched up together, much like how dementia causes brain proteins to bunch up into plaques. This bunching up, or aggregation, could continue even after death, turning regions of the brain into hard masses. Read full article here
Merv
September 30, 2022
