Have a pair of Harvard scientists created the most powerful form of energy storage known to humanity? Hydrogen hit the headlines this weekend, as Harvard researchers Ranga Dias and Isaac Silvera published a paper in Science claiming to have transmuted hydrogen into a solid metal (Observation of the Wigner-Huntington transition to metallic hydrogen). The pair…
hydrogen
Pressure experiment offers tantalising glimpse of metallic hydrogen
For some fuel-cell manufacturers, compressing hydrogen to a liquid has become routine. But for decades, materials scientists have dreamed of going further and forcing hydrogen into a solid metal phase. Metal hydrogen is believed to exist at the heart of gas giant planets like Saturn and Jupiter, and if replicated on Earth could form the…
Nickel-based catalyst performs competitively with platinum in hydroxide exchange membrane fuel cells
The hunt for platinum’s successor as a hydrogen oxidation catalyst continues in this month’s Nature Communications (Zhuang, Z. et al. Nickel supported on nitrogen-doped carbon nanotubes as hydrogen oxidation reaction catalyst in alkaline electrolyte. Nat. Commun. 7:10141 doi: 10.1038/ncomms10141 (2016)). A research team from the University of Delaware, in partnership with Beijing University of Chemical…
European coalition launches flagship hydrogen program
There is a reason that transport technologies have remained so conservative over the decades. A new fuelling system can only work if the infrastructure exists to get the energy to the car, but the cost of setting up such a system is prohibitive when so few people own the cars. This has been one of the…