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"We are sidestepping all of the scientific challenges that have held fusion energy back for more than half a century," says the director of an Australian company that claims its hydrogen-boron fusion technology is already working a billion times better than expected.

ydrogen could play a key role in cultivating a "green and sustainable" source of energy to power portable fuel cells of the future, researchers say. Hydrogen is believed to be a feasible alternative to fossil fuels because of its affordability and environmental friendliness. It is found throughout the environment, but producing it involves efficiently separating it from the compounds it is contained it. There are currently a number of ways this can be done, but methods can be slow and expensive. However, a team of scientists has now said hydrogen fuel could be generated "on-demand" thanks to a separation process...

-snip- my love of farms and farming never went away, and in 1999, I purchased my paternal grandfather’s 130-hectare (320-acre) property, Pinehurst Farm, which had been out of the family for 55 years. I wasn’t exactly sure what I’d do with the place, but by the time I retired in 2007, there was more and more talk about climate change due to human-caused carbon emissions. I knew that agriculture has a large carbon footprint, and I wondered if there was a way to make farming more sustainable. -snip- I recalled a conversation I’d had with my dad and his friend,...

Scientists have developed a large-scale economical method to extract hydrogen (H2) from oil sands (natural bitumen) and oil fields. This can be used to power hydrogen-powered vehicles, which are already marketed in some countries, as well as to generate electricity; hydrogen is regarded as an efficient transport fuel, similar to petrol and diesel, but with no pollution problems. The process can extract hydrogen from existing oil sands reservoirs, with huge existing supplies found in Canada and Venezuela. Interestingly, this process can be applied to mainstream oil fields, causing them to produce hydrogen instead of oil. Hydrogen powered vehicles, including cars,...

NASA has focused its vegetable-growing efforts on lettuce, which astronauts tend to while they live on the International Space Station. The orbiting laboratory poses different challenges than the Red Planet's surface, however, and crops that Mars visitors can expect to rely on may not be to everyone's taste. "In fact, in this particular area the soils are more alkaline so this would be OK for growing asparagus and beans and not potatoes," NASA chief scientist Jim Green said during a presentation held here last week as part of the International Astronautical Congress of soil studied by NASA's Curiosity rover. However...

PHOENIX - Unrest in a country thousands of miles away can cause fuel cost to spike overnight, wreaking havoc on companies trying to get their products to consumers. It's one of the most frustrating and costly aspects of running a business, which gets passed on to the consumer in the price they pay for products. The solution to that problem may be Nikola Motors, which is purportedly the first hydrogen-powered truckmaker in the world. The company recently moved its world headquarters to Arizona. "This machine is one of the largest in the whole world," said Nikola Motors CEO Trevor Milton....

Oil fields, even abandoned oil fields, still contain significant amounts of oil. The researchers have found that injecting oxygen into the fields raises the temperature and liberates H2, which can them be separated from other gases via specialist filters. Hydrogen is not pre-existing in the reservoirs, but pumping oxygen means that the reaction to form hydrogen can take place. "This technique can draw up huge quantities of hydrogen while leaving the carbon in the ground. When working at production level, we anticipate we will be able to use the existing infrastructure and distribution chains to produce H2 for between 10...

Research reveals that plate tectonics started on Earth 600 million years before what was believed earlier... Where it was previously thought that plate tectonics started about 2.7 billion years ago, a team of international scientists used the microscopic leftovers of a drop of water that was transported into the Earth's deep mantle - through plate tectonics - to show that this process started 600 million years before that. An article on their research that proves plate tectonics started on Earth 3.3 billion years ago was published in the high impact academic journal, Nature, on 16 July... For their research, the...

While the vision of whisking passengers between rooftops in aircraft capable of vertical takeoff has largely solidified in the general shape of multiple rotors, some with airfoils and others without, the question of how to power this new kind of aircraft is less so. Some envision pure electric with lots of high-capacity batteries; others believe batteries alone will never be ready to produce the power required, and pitch hybrid designs—with a fossil-fueled engine producing electricity to assist the motors during some or all phases of flight. However, one recent entrant in the field of some 150 such aircraft being...

For more than a century, physicists have hunted for superconductivity in warmer materials.... In 1986, researchers uncovered ceramics that were superconductive at temperatures as high as 30 degrees above absolute zero, or minus 406 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 243 degrees Celsius). Later, in the 1990s, researchers first looked in earnest at very high pressures, to see if they might reveal new kinds of superconductors. The next big breakthrough came in 2001, when researchers showed that magnesium diboride (MgB2) was superconductive at 39 degrees above absolute zero, or minus 389 F (minus 234 C). Since then, the hunt for warm superconductors has...

A research team in Belgium says its prototype panel can produce 250 liters of hydrogen gas per day Solar panels are multiplying on rooftops and in gardens worldwide as communities clamor for renewable electricity. But engineers in Belgium say the panels could do more than keep the lights on—they could also produce hydrogen gas on site, allowing families to heat their homes without expanding their carbon footprints. A team at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, or KU Leuven, says it has developed a solar panel that converts sunlight directly into hydrogen using moisture in the air. The prototype takes the water vapor...

Drivers Seek Mileage Boost From Hydrogen, Oxygen BubblesBy TIM KNAUSS   Steve Kushnir's 'Hydrogen Hurricane' is an equipment package he sells that uses a car's electricity to make hydrogen and improve the way the engine burns gas. (Photo By Frank Ordonez)     [Liverpool, NY] -- Stephen Kushnir's 7-year-old Chevrolet Prizm used to get 35 miles per gallon on the highway. Not bad, but Kushnir thought he could do better. A month ago Kushnir, a middle school technology teacher in Liverpool, N.Y., popped the hood and installed a gas-saving gizmo he had purchased over the Internet. He got it from...

Whoops! The Earth's atmosphere is far bigger than we had realized, scientists have announced. The outermost part of our atmosphere reaches nearly twice as far as the Moon and is about 50 times as big as our own planet, new research has shown. “The Moon flies through Earth’s atmosphere,” says Igor Baliukin of Russia’s Space Research Institute, lead author of the paper presenting the results. “We were not aware of it until we dusted off observations made over two decades ago by the SOHO spacecraft.” At the boundary of own atmosphere and outer space, there is a cloud of hydrogen...

In his book "2061 - Odyssey Three" (the third of his Space Odyssey series), Arthur C. Clarke put forward the intriguing proposal that the core of the planet Jupiter was, in fact, a diamond the size of Earth. Now Clarke, even though a science fiction author of some repute, had a science background and always tried to bring rigorous scientific accuracy to his stories. So, could his proposition be possible? The somewhat predictable answer is - we don't know. But we can analyse the possibility within known scientific parametres, to see if it is, at least, possible. For diamond to...

Posted on November 9, 2018November 9, 2018 by Evan Gough Not all the Earth’s Water Came From Comets We have comets and asteroids to thank for Earth’s water, according to the most widely-held theory among scientists. But it’s not that cut-and-dried. It’s still a bit of a mystery, and a new study suggests that not all of Earth’s water was delivered to our planet that way.Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, and it’s at the center of the question surrounding Earth’s water. This new study was co-led by Peter Buseck, Regents’ Professor in the School of...

Photo: Nikola Motor Company _____________________________________________________________________________________ Nikola Motor Company has filed a lawsuit in Arizona alleging that Tesla’s all-electric Semi infringes on the hydrogen truck startup’s patents. The lawsuit claims Tesla willfully copied these patents in creating its electric truck, and Nikola is seeking $2 billion in damages in return. “It’s patently obvious there is no merit to this lawsuit,” a spokesperson for Tesla told The Verge. A representative for Nikola Motors said in a statement to The Verge that “[w]e are not commenting because it is in the courts. The lawsuit speaks for itself.” Nikola was founded in 2014,...

Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles are believed to carry a total of approximately 1,000 strategic nuclear warheads that can hit the US less than 30 minutes after being launched. Of this total, about 700 warheads are rated at 800 kilotons; that is, each has the explosive power of 800,000 tons of TNT. What follows is a description of the consequences of the detonation of a single such warhead over midtown Manhattan, in the heart of New York City. The initial fireball. The warhead would probably be detonated slightly more than a mile above the city, to maximize the damage created by...

Harvard scientists triumphantly announced that they'd created metallic hydrogen last month, but now it's suddenly gone. Scientists hailed it as the “holy grail” of high pressure physics when they finally produced it in the lab: metallic hydrogen, a century after it was first theorized to exist. And now that sample, which had been held in a hyper refrigerated laboratory, has vanished into thin air, and scientists can’t figure out why. Reports indicate that the metallic hydrogen had been kept between a vice of two diamonds at huge pressures while being stored at 80 Kelvin, but something happened in the lab...

Last October, Harvard University physicist Isaac Silvera invited a few colleagues to stop by his lab to glimpse something that may not exist anywhere else in the universe. Word got around, and the next morning there was a line. Throughout the day, hundreds filed in to peer through a benchtop microscope at a reddish silver dot trapped between two diamond tips. Silvera finally closed shop at 6 p.m. to go home. "It took weeks for the excitement to die down," Silvera says.

Producing metallic hydrogen in the laboratory has been a dream of high-pressure researchers ever since 1935, when theorists first predicted its existence3. When squeezed with enough pressure inside an anvil, hydrogen should be able to conduct electricity, the hallmark of a metallic state. And theorists say that the material could have other exotic properties, such as being a superconductor...even at room temperature. ... Dias and Silvera say that they were able to squeeze their hydrogen gas at greater pressures than anyone else has managed. To do so, they used an anvil that can fit inside a cryostat, enabling them to...