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The universe just got a lot more interesting.
We've come a long way from peat furnaces and bog iron.
Purple is the new black.
It’s usually touted as a clean energy source, but that may not be the case
The vast majority of stars are made almost entirely of hydrogen (about 90%) and helium (about 10%), with trace amounts of heavier elements.
We absolutely need this if we're to ever establish a colony on the Red Planet.
The extraordinary findings have important implications for alien life.
The Sun has enough hydrogen fuel to last it another 5 billion years. However, life on Earth might become extinct as early as 1 billion years from now.
They're not big.
Air travel is surging around the world. Our only shot at decarbonizing the industry is to radically change the way aircraft is powered.
1% might sound small, but taken on a planetary level -- it's a whole lot.
The breakthrough validates our current models of how the universe works.
This was a VERY real issue up to now.
These bright blue trains are the greenest around.
A little help from life goes a long way.
Astronauts' waste will not be wasted.
Research doesn't have to be glamorous or flashy to be significant.
Stable fusion is the holy grail of energy production.
Surprisingly pure.
German engineers turn on a huge light bulb to better understand solar energy.
If confirmed, this could be one of the most revolutionary material of the century
Ja, das ist Sehr gut!
Using energy from the sun, researchers converted seawater into hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) -- a fuel that can be used in fuel cells, instead of elemental hydrogen.
Indiana University scientists have built a highly efficient bio-material that can serve as a catalyst for hydrogen production. This material takes us halfway towards the long sought-after "holy grail" of splitting water to make hydrogen and oxygen for fueling cheap and efficient cars that run on water.
It’s no secret that when it comes to condoms, the pleasure factor plays a big role – some people simply don’t want to use condoms because it diminishes their pleasure. With that in mind, researchers from Australia are now working to create condoms that feel just like bare skin… or even better! This year, over […]
Hydrogen is a great medium for storing energy. It can be used as an alternative to batteries to store the excess energy from renewable energy systems like solar panels or wind turbines, and can be released from a tank to power a vehicle equipped with fuel cells. More than a decade ago, these prospects hyped the so called "hydrogen economy". Governments and funding agencies drew up ambitious plans to develop cheaper fuel cells and to enable cars to store practicable quantities of hydrogen. In 2003, President George Bush committed $720 million to the research effort. But eventually... it all turned out to be a pipeline dream mostly because of two shortcomings: hydrogen is very expensive to store and make; from renewable sources at least.
Astronomers using the Hubble telescope have identified a warm Neptune-sized planet that is "bleeding" a huge hydrogen cloud - thus increasing the odds of finding liquid oceans on gas giants.
China is the largest polluter in the world at the moment, and they’re also reaping what they sew. But you can’t accuse the Chinese for not trying to right their ways – at least some of them; in an effort to mitigate the ridiculous amounts of smog that clouds some of China’s cities, scientists have […]
A team at Caltech has devised a new film coating that facilitates catalysis and electron transfer in a solar powered system that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen, which can be used as fuels. Such a system is also called an artificial leaf or solar-fuel generator because in many ways it mimics the process which plants use to convert sunlight and CO2 into oxygen and fuel (sugars, carbohydrates). The researchers make note, however, that they're still a long way from making it commercial viable, but these sort of updates are inspiring.
Major automaker Toyota announced at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that it would release all of its nearly 6,000 patents pertaining to hydrogen car technology royalty-free for the next five years. Officials most likely hope that this sort of move will encourage other auto manufacturers and capital to invest in the hydrogen economy. […]
A team of UK researchers led by none other but Nobel Laureate Andre Geim – one of persons involved in graphene’s discovery in 2004 – has shown that the wondrous two dimensional material graphene can used as a proton exchange membrane in fuel cells. The find took everybody by surprise since no one expected graphene could […]
A new method of producing hydrogen has been reported by researchers at University of Glasgow that’s 30 times faster than current state-of-the-art methods, providing yet another advance that might one day lead to a sustainable hydrogen based economy. There’s only so much that renewable energy can grow with today’s infrastructure due to base load considerations. […]
Researchers from Stanford have found a way to split water into oxygen and hydrogen using very little energy; the hydrogen they obtain could be used to power fuel cells in zero-emissions vehicles. I’m quite excited for cars that run on hydrogen, which are set to hit the market in 2015; but while they are always presented as […]
Part of an extraordinary venture, researchers at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) report they’ve synthesized hydrocarbon fuel solely from seawater by transforming the CO2 and H2 found in the water. To demonstrate they viability of the fuel, a replica of the legendary WWII P-51 was fitted by an off-the-shelf (OTS) and unmodified two-stroke internal combustion engine […]
It almost seems too good to be true – a novel device that uses only sunlight and wastewater to produce hydrogen gas could provide a sustainable energy source, while also improving the efficiency of the waste water system. A sustainable, self-driven system In a paper published in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano, a […]
Scientists have, for the first time, obtained actual images of one of the most important interactions in the world – the special type of chemical bond called the hydrogen bond, which keeps our DNA together and gives water its unique properties. Using a technique called high-resolution atomic force microscopy (AFM), researchers in China have managed […]
Hydrogen is the most common element in the Universe. It’s the first element in the periodic table, and it has but one proton and one electron. Understanding how it behaves at very large pressures is crucial to our understanding of matter and the nature of hydrogen-rich planets. Under typical conditions, Hydrogen is a diatomic molecule […]
Hydrogen fuel has been eyeballed by scientists, as well as governments and energy corporations, for many years now as a potential alternative fuel source because of its incredibly high energy. It’s hard to imagine any other non-carbon fuel source capable of driving rockets or high velocity vehicles, like formula 1 sports cars. Besides it being […]
Hydrogen is an extremely appealing energy source, despite the immense hurdles than come with storing it. Still fuel cells based on hydrogen are extremely useful, and a team of researchers at University at Buffalo may have found the fastest and most effective way of obtaining this element. Basically, it’s as easy as adding water. The scientists […]
Researchers at Yale University have successfully mange to utilize a novel MRI technique to 3-D image the insides of hard and soft solids, like bone and tissue, opening the way for a new array of applications, like previously difficult to image dense objects. Typically, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can produce a 3-D image of an object […]
For years and years scientists have tried to make hydrogen exhibit metal properties, by experimentally proving what’s already been more or less acknowledged in theory. Hydrogen is an alkali metal, and under the right circumstances it can be fooled into becoming a metal. These “right” circumstances have yet to be found, until recently when a […]
One of the fundamental backbones of the Big Bang theory states that after the rapid expansion of the Universe only the lightest elements were formed. A group of scientists stumbled across an amazing discovery recently when they found a gas cloud dating from the time of the early Universe exclusively made out of hydrogen and helium, proving […]
Developing safe, reliable, compact, and cost-effective hydrogen storage technologies is one of the most technically challenging barriers to the widespread use of hydrogen as a form of energy. Hydrogen is a great fuel, and if used in perfect conditions it can power numerous applications. However, with today’s tech a hydrogen powered car can’t even travel […]
If you look at this picture, you will probably see what can only be described as an unremarkable, even faint star. But this ancient star, in the constellation of Leo (The Lion), called SDSS J102915+172927 has astrophysicists scratching their heads, searching for new answers. A team of European astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) […]
Superfluidity is a weird property, by all standards. Basically it is a state of matter in which all the viscosity of a fluid vanishes; what happes is you take some atoms, and you chill them, and then chill them some more, until they get close to absolute zero (-273.15 degrees Celsius, the temperature below which […]
Green fuels are a really hot topic, with every single day bringing a new (claimed) discovery or breakthrough, but many of them are just minor improvements. Still, every once in a while you hear about something that sounds really promising (like green gasoline). Now it seems that chemists are describing development of a “revolutionary” process […]
