CHEMISTRY AIR INTO ELECTRICITY Anusha Shenoy 7B SCIENTISTS DISCOVERED AN ENZYME THAT PRODUCES ELECTRICITY FROM AIR: Australian scientists have discovered an enzyme that converts air into energy. The finding, published in the journal ”Nature”, reveals that this enzyme uses the low amounts of hydrogen in the atmosphere to create an electrical current. This enzyme was present in a common soil worm. Researchers have extracted the enzyme responsible for using atmospheric hydrogen from a bacterium called Mycobacterium smegmatis. This enzyme, called Huc, turns hydrogen gas into an electrical current, it even consumes hydrogen below atmospheric level, as low as 0.00005% of the air we breathe. Huc can be used to develop small-air powered devices, such as a spray gun. Converting waste plastic bottles into jet fuel: Plastic waste can be turned into cyclic and aromatic hydrocarbons, which can then be used as important components of diesel and jet fuel. A huge amount of plastic is discarded after use, causing big environmental problems. This issue has recently been gaining increasing global attention. A team led by Tao Zhang and Ning Li from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics in China has come up with a process to convert common plastics into jet fuels or diesel. Aromatics are absorbed by polymer seals within the engine, better than the alkanes used in regular fuels. PET from plastic bottles is first broken down into dimethyl terephthalate using methanol, once the reaction has cooled, it settles into a solid, which can easily be split, so the methanol can be re-used. Then the solid is then converted into the desired hydrocarbons by hydrogenation followed by hydrodeoxygenation. This avoids generating unnecessary waste streams – and the use of heterogeneous catalysts. The technique, therefore, appears to be a promising way to divert plastic waste away from landfill.