Many agree that replacing conventional petrol driven cars with hydrogen is a good idea provided the hydrogen does not originate in a process involving oil as the only product from hydrogen burning is water, rather than carbon dioxide.

However the road to hydrogen-powered vehicles will not be easy, industry experts state. Representatives of European and American car and energy companies at the National Hydrogen Association convention said hydrogen technology is feasible, but faces big challenges to become commercially viable.

"We all have our homework to do in the coming years," said Klaus Bonhof, manager of the alternative fuels division of DaimlerChrysler AG. "We must produce technology viable in volume, and that technology must be commercially applicable."

Several car compnaies had hydrogen-powered vehicles on display at the conference, but all have similar technological challenges, including costs that range up to a million dollars a piece and limited range on a hydrogen fill-up. While a hydrogen-pwered car can travel 45 to 50 miles on a gallon, the fuel tank only provide a range of 125 to 150 miles. This is because hydrogen is put in a car as a liquid at very low temperatures, but reverts to a gas as on warming. The gas produced has to be vented while the car is not being used so that after a few days the tank will be empty.

The industry is working on this and BMW vice president of clean technology Frank Ochmann said BMW is testing an insulated tank that would keep hydrogen cold and liquid. "If you put in this tank a snowman, it would take about thirteen years to melt down," he said.

Developing hydrogen fuel station is easy part, experts said as hydrogen is already shipped to industrial users in tanks or moved through pipelines. BMW estimates it will be 2025 before hydrogen powered vehicles are commonly produced and sold.

BuckyEggAn egg-shaped fullerene, or "buckyball egg" has been made and characterized by chemists in America at UC Davis (California), Virginia Tech, and Emory and Henry College in Virginia. They were trying to encapsulate terbium atoms within fullerenes but instead encapsulated terbium nitride within an egg-shaped fullerene.1

The compound Tb₃N@C₈₄ was synthesized using an arc-discharge generator by vaporizing composite graphite rods containing a mixture of Tb₄O₇, graphite, and iron nitride as catalyst in a low-pressure He/N₂atmosphere. This gave a complex mixture of products and chromatography gave seven terbium-containing fractions, the fourth fraction of which contained two isomers of Tb₃N@C₈₄. Crystallographc studies show the compound from one angle in particular seems very egg shaped! Remarkable! The Tb₃N unit is clearly visible (terbium in green and nitrogen in blue).

Until the publication of this work it was normally accepted that no two pentagons can touch in a fullerene and are always surrounded by hexagons. However in this case there are two pentagons (the 8 atoms at the pointy part of the egg at the top of the attached image) linked as a bent pentalene fragment.

• 1. Tb3N@C84 :  An Improbable, Egg-Shaped Endohedral Fullerene that Violates the Isolated Pentagon Rule,
  Beavers, Christine M., Zuo Tianming, Duchamp James C., Harich Kim, Dorn Harry C., Olmstead Marilyn M., and Balch Alan L.
  , Journal of the American Chemical Society, 09/2006, Volume 128, Issue 35, p.11352 - 11353, (2006)
  

Earth's most severe mass extinction - an event 250 million years ago that wiped out 90 percent of all marine species and 70 percent of land vertebrates - was triggered by a collision with a comet or asteroid, according to a team led by The University of Washington, Seattle, USA. Evidence is based upon elegant findings involving carbon molecules called buckminsterfullerenes (C₆₀, Buckyballs) with the gases helium and argon trapped inside their cage structures.

The scientists do not know the site of the impact 250 million years ago, when all Earth's land formed a supercontinent called Pangea. However, the space body left a calling card - a much higher level of complex carbon molecules called buckminsterfullerenes, or Buckyballs, with the noble (or chemically nonreactive) gases helium and argon trapped inside their cage structures. Fullerenes, which contain 60 or more carbon atoms and have a structure resembling a soccer ball or a geodesic dome, are named for Buckminster Fuller, who invented the geodesic dome.

The researchers know these particular Buckyballs are extraterrestrial because the noble gases trapped inside have an unusual ratio of isotopes. For instance, terrestrial helium is mostly helium-4 and contains only a small amount of helium-3, while extraterrestrial helium - the kind found in these fullerenes - is mostly helium-3.

"These things form in carbon stars. That's what's exciting about finding fullerenes as a tracer," according to Luann Becker, one of scientific team involved. The extreme temperatures and gas pressures in carbon stars are perhaps the only way extraterrestrial noble gases could be forced inside a fullerene, she said. These gas-laden fullerenes were formed outside the Solar System, and their concentration at the Permian-Triassic boundary means they were delivered by a comet or asteroid.

Nobel laureate Richard Smalley, the Rice University professor who helped discover buckyballs (buckminsterfullerene, C₆₀, the football (soccer) ball shaped form of carbon, died at the age of 62. Richard Smalley shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Sir Harold Kroto (Sussex) and Robert Curl (also Rice) for the identification of the new form of carbon known as buckminsterfullerene because of its similarity to Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes. The Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology continues to champion the efforts of Smalley through research, educational and community programs, corporate partnerships, and government relations.

A NASA press release indicates that NASA's Spirit, the first of two Mars Exploration Rovers on the surface within Mars' Gusev crater, has identified carbonate minerals "in the rover's first survey of the site with its infrared sensing instrument, called the miniature thermal emission spectrometer or Mini-TES. Carbonates form in the presence of water, but it's too early to tell whether the amounts detected come from interaction with water vapor in Mars' atmosphere or are evidence of a watery local environment in the past, scientists emphasized."

"We came looking for carbonates. We have them. We're going to chase them," said Dr. Phil Christensen of Arizona State University, Tempe, leader of the Mini-TES team. Previous infrared readings from Mars orbit have revealed a low concentration of carbonates distributed globally. Christensen has interpreted that as the result of dust interaction with atmospheric water. First indications are that the carbonate concentration near Spirit may be higher than the Mars global average.

After the rover drives off its lander platform, infrared measurements it takes as it explores the area may allow scientists to judge whether the water indicated by the nearby carbonates was in the air or in a suspected ancient lake. http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/spirit/20040109a/graph-carb...

The U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory reports that scientists at the US Brookhaven National Laboratory and the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center caused an individual carbon nanotube to emit light for the first time. This may have significance for many of the proposed applications for carbon nanotubes including in electronics and photonics.

The light emission is the result of a process called "electron-hole recombination." By running an electric current through a carbon nanotube - a long, hollow cylindrical molecule that is only one and a half nanometers (a billionth of a meter) in diameter - negatively charged electrons in the nanotube molecule combine with positively charged "holes," which are locations in the molecule where electrons are missing. When an electron fills a hole, it emits a photon - a tiny burst of light.

"We produced infrared light by applying voltages to a specific type of nanotube such that many electrons and holes end up in the nanotube, where they combine. This makes the nanotube the world's smallest electrically-controllable light emitter," said James Misewich, a materials scientist at Brookhaven. "It's an exciting result, and my colleagues and I plan to continue studying the effect to determine the mechanisms behind it. For example, we hope to understand how to make the nanotubes emit other types of light, such as visible light, and how to increase the efficiency of the emission." Carbon nanotubes do not yet have any mainstream practical applications, but researchers are investigating ways to use them in flat-panel displays, such as televisions and computer monitors, or as reinforcements in building materials, due to their exceptional mechanical strength. Misewich also suggested that, if additional research leads to an increased efficiency of nanotube light emission, the nanotubes could possibly be used in lighting applications.

The observation that soot makes global warming "worse" is well covered today. The BBC covers this - largely because it appears that soot is more important for global warming than realised earlier. Dr James Hansen and Larissa Nazarenko, (Goddard Institute for Space Studies, NASA, and Columbia University Earth Institute) suggest that trying to reduce the amount of soot produced would be easier than cutting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. Concentrations of soot are often high over China and India, where coal and organic fuels are used domestically, and over Europe and North America, where the main source is diesel oil.1

• 1. Soot climate forcing via snow and ice albedos,
  Hansen, J.
  , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 01/2004, Volume 101, Issue 2, p.423 - 428, (2004)