Green Options

UC Irvine students Kyle Good and Bryan Le have come with the next X PRIZE challenge: build an ultracapacitor. The pair won the X PRIZE Foundation’s “What’s Your Crazy Green Idea” contest, which asked entrants to post a 2 minute video describing a concept for an X PRIZE in the Energy and Environment category. Le and Good won $25,000 for their idea. The winning video is below.

New research shows that mushrooms feeding on dead vegetation in soils of northern areas like Alaska and Siberia, eat less and produce less harmful carbon dioxide, when temperatures climb.

When researchers from UC Irvine set out to investigate how climate change was affecting carbon dioxide output by fungi in dryer parts of the Northern Hemisphere, they discovered something altogether surprising, and not at all in line with predictions.

Oftentimes mushrooms feed off of dead vegetation in the soil.  During this process, they emit carbon dioxide that was being stored in that dead matter, into the atmosphere.

Scientists expected warmer than normal soils to emit larger amounts of carbon dioxide because cold temperatures are believed to slow down the process by which fungi convert soil carbon into carbon dioxide.