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...energy, biodiversity and community resilience – social-ecological systems on which we all depend. However, design professionals working with services and hardware such as products and buildings typically prioritise the social and technical aspects of systems. Creating conditions for resilience requires us to develop and practise ecologically literate ways of designing...

...energy needs is considered...This free course, Biofuels, investigates what is meant by a biofuel and covers the advantages of using biofuels compared with fossil fuels. The different types of biofuel are explored, with particular emphasis on transport biofuels. Finally, the issue of whether biofuels are the complete answer to our future energy needs is...

...energy, such as moving matter around within a solid without risking melting or changing the basic shape of a component. On the other hand, it can be a real nuisance. It can make magnetic disks 'forget'. It can leave materials 'sapped' of their strength. Just a few degrees of temperature change can make some things unrecognisably different. Temperature really does present...

...energy particles. These particles cause permanent damage to electronics, which causes them to become unreliable over time and eventually fail. There are three main radiation sources in space. The first source consists of galactic particles, originating within the Milky Way, along with extra-galactic particles, originating beyond the Milky Way. These can be very high...

...the tiny green structures called chloroplasts. These give leaves their colour, and capture light energy from the Sun. What happens next is a complex chain of reactions that can be summarised very simply. Water and carbon dioxide are converted, using the sun's energy, into simple sugars. The oxygen released in the reaction is now available for other organisms to respire....

...energy usage. In the meantime, we in the UK face a national problem. We rely on gas for a lot of our energy. It’s cleaner than coal, but we’re running out. I’m very uneasy about relying on Russia and other eastern nations to supply a major fraction of our energy needs, which is the prospect we face if we don’t produce gas of our own. Fortunately, there is a...

...energies in the alternative units of electronvolts (where 1 eV = 1.60 × 10-19 J, with 1 keV = 103 eV and 1 MeV = 106 eV for convenience). This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course S384 Astrophysics of stars and exoplanets...White dwarfs and neutron stars: Learning outcomes - After studying this course, you should be able to: appreciate...