UTSA history professors Catherine Nolan-Ferrell and Cindy Ermus have each received one-year, $60,000 grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support their research on relevant societal issues, including questions of citizenship and human rights and lessons learned from past pandemics that impact our understanding of COVID-19. Their projects were selected from among more than 2,000 applications submitted to the NEH in 2021.

Research led by the University of Wisconsin–Madison assessed the environmental impacts of corn ethanol and the policy that governs it, using a combination of econometric analyses, land use data and biophysical modeling. The analysis shows that the carbon emissions from using land to grow corn can negate or even reverse any climate advantages of corn ethanol relative to gasoline.

A new analysis, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that the carbon emissions from using land to grow corn can negate or even reverse any climate advantages of corn ethanol relative to gasoline.

In a review published in Advanced Photonics, an international team provides a comprehensive overview of the latest advances in the new and fast-developing branch of photonics focused on light–matter interactions in time-varying media. Starting from the basic building blocks of temporal scattering, they review the wide spectrum of opportunities for wave manipulation opened by different forms of time-switching. They look at multiple time-scattering processes, to study periodic and quasiperiodic photonic time-crystals, along with the new directions opened by these constructs for topological physics in the time domain. They discuss the engineering of synthetic frequency dimensions, nonreciprocal gain, and power steering, as well as non-Hermitian time-varying systems, temporal disorder, and surface-wave manipulation achievable through temporal modulation.

ORNL, TVA and TNECD were recognized by the Federal Laboratory Consortium for their impactful partnership that resulted in a record $2.3 billion investment by Ultium Cells, a General Motors and LG Energy Solution joint venture, to build a battery cell manufacturing plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, that will employ 1,300 people. The honor is ORNL’s first-ever FLC award for economic development. Additionally, four technologies developed by ORNL researchers have won Excellence in Technology Transfer Awards.

If the UN Sustainable Development Goal to lift over one billion people out of poverty were to be reached in 2030, the impact on global carbon emissions would be minimal. That sounds good; however, the main reason for this is the huge inequality in the carbon footprint of rich and poor nations. This conclusion was drawn by scientists from the Energy and Sustainability Research Institute of the University of Groningen (the Netherlands), together with colleagues from China and the US.