Nov. 3, 2004 Scientists have made a world-first discovery which
is a step towards using environmentally-friendly hydrogen to
power our cars. A team from the Universities of Newcastle upon
Tyne and Liverpool in the UK, who report their findings in the
prestigious academic journal, Science, have found a safe way of
storing and releasing hydrogen to produce energy. They do this
using nanoporous materials, which have tiny pores that are one
hundred-thousandth (100,000th) the thickness of a sheet of
paper. Hydrogen has been investigated for a long time as a
replacement for petrol, amid worries over the long-term
availability of fossil fuels. It is also an environmentally-
friendly alternative, as it produces only water rather than the
'greenhouse gas', carbon dioxide. However, scientists and others
have been baffled for a long time about how to store the
substance - which is a gas and so contains less energy in a
given volume than the liquid petrol - safely and efficiently. In
his January 2003 State of the Union Ad