Green machine: It's your eco-friendly funeral
Cleaner ways to dispose of the deceased are becoming available, from dissolving a corpse in chemicals to freeze-drying it to a powder.
Helen Knight
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Biofuels learn to eat less
Production of bioethanol has attracted global controversy because it uses important food crops. That could be about to change.
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Renewable energy: Electric dreams
Smokestacks, cooling towers, reactor domes and gas installations are defining features of our modern landscape. Each is a key component in electricity generation, but perhaps not for much longer. Sprinkled over every continent are the totems of a new era of power: wind turbines and solar energy collectors. So far they are few and far between, but that's about to change.
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Texas oil companies will soon be locking away carbon
The industry most often accused of being responsible for the excess carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is, strange as it may seem, desperate to buy more of the stuff. Oil companies are paying industrial plants and natural gas processing facilities to bottle their waste CO2, and are then pumping it underground.
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Renewable energy: Will the lights stay on?
One of the key problems with renewables is their intermittent availability. You can only generate energy from the wind when it is blowing, or from the sun when it's shining. Critics argue this is why we will never be able to rely on renewables for the majority of our electricity generation. But that criticism may soon be silenced.
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Wonderfuel: Welcome to the age of unconventional gas
We've found lots of it, we're learning how to get it and we think we can clean it before we burn it. Is natural gas the secure answer to our energy woes?