The air contains two inert ingredients, one of which we need to make reactive to produce fertiliser, the other the engine of global warming. That’s nitrogen and carbon dioxide of course. Nitrogen in the air isn’t totally useless – it has the negative virtue of keeping the oxygen content in check – without which world would be prone to repeated disastrous conflagrations.

But we need to tap a small proportion of the nitrogen to produce fertiliser. Nitrogen is the limiting factor in growing food and without artificial fertiliser the world could support only about half the population it currently has.

Most of our nitrogen fertiliser comes from the Haber-Bosch process, invented just over a century ago. This produces ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen using high pressures and temperature and catalysts. The statistics of the current Haber-Bosch  technology are staggering. It consumes 5% of global natural gas and releases large quantities of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Better, carbon-free processes are going to be required as the world’s population increases towards its projected 10 billion by2100.

Carbon dioxide is currently the problem but like nitrogen it could be a solution: it is a resource that could be mined if we had the right processes. Carbon in its reduced form is the stuff of life: the fabric of all living things, the basis of food, energy and a feedstock for plastics and many of the materials that sustain us.

Both the chemical bonds in nitrogen and carbon dioxide are difficult to break to produce the substances we need; great ingenuity is now being applied to the question.

In a recent Science paper (8 August 2014) Stuart Licht’s team at George Washington University, Washington, have reversed an existing technology, the ammonia fuel cell, to produce ammonia efficiently from water, air and electricity, using a potassium hydroxide/sodium hydroxide electrlyte and a nano iron oxide catalyt. The yields are excellent and the scope for scaling up to industrial production promising. There is even an option to incorporate thermal energy into the process.

The key to bringing carbon dioxide into the virtuous material cycle is methanol, already a key industrial substance. There are many processes for converting carbon dioxide to methanol, some already in industrial production, notable at the George Olah methanol plant in Iceland.

In another Science paper (1 August 2014) a Spanish/US/Venezuelan team report new catalysts for methanol production from carbon dioxide, using a catalyst of copper coated with cerium oxide or copper with both cerium oxide and titanium dioxide. The latter was the most successful.

The question with all such processes is not does it work but does it work efficiently enough to oust the current standard technology? With both atmospheric nitrogen fixation and carbon dioxide reduction, necessity is driving such technologies to fruition.

The story of the George Olah methanol plan is told in Nanoscience: Giants of the Infinitesimal.

The name Allan Turing features often now in biological research papers. His mechanism for pattern-formation, proposed 1953, was purely speculative and mathematical but has now been observed in many actual biological processes. The most recent example is the most fundamental. The mammalian body plan – the tetrapod with usually 5 digits – is clearly one of natures’ most inspired productions. Biologists have gone a long way towards understanding the genes and associated proteins that produce these forms but how the genes sculpt forms is not well understood.

Turing’s idea was that activating and in inhibiting substances could through diffusion produce waves of activity that could pattern biological structures.

Now a team working in Barcelona has shown that a Turing network involving a diffusible activating protein (bone morphogenetic protein) and the signalling protein Wnt periodically turn on and off the transcription factor Sox9 to create the primordial digits. The problem of biological form is perhaps the most profound scientific question in existence. It is remarkable that, having been responsible for the basic logical framework of the computer and playing a crucial role in the war as a Bletchley code breaker, Turing should currently be so influential in biology over 70 years after his death. His work on pattern-formation features in Nanoscience: Giants of the Infinitesimal.

Science, 1 August 2014

When I first discovered the Japanese scientist Koryo Miura’s origami structures in the ‘90s I was thrilled by the range of their applicability. Miura had worked on solar cell arrays that could deploy in space, a small package that could fit singly inside a satellite for launch. But his idea proved to have many ramifications. He developed an elegant map that folds back in one movement and the principle of his folds was discovered to be the same principle nature uses to launch some tree leaves into space. I told the story of Miura’s folds in The Gecko’s Foot.

Twenty  years on, interest in Miura’s patterns is growing. In recreational human origami, intricate folds are carried out sequentially but nature can often assemble complex folds without any guiding hand. It is this self-assembling origami that now interests scientists.

Two papers in Science (8 August 2014) show how these ideas are developing. One from the Wyss Institute for Biologically inspired Engineering develops the concept of a self-assembling robot using heat-actuated self-folding hinges. In the other paper, a group from several US universities develops the Miura-ori pattern for the assembly of metamaterials that can be refolded into different patterns. Since metamaterials  are tuned structures with novel optical properties, the prospect of adjustable configurations (retuning) is attractive. The science of bending materials has many twists still to come.