The Rise of the Hydrogen Fuel Cell

The problems with fossil fuels are numerous, whether or not you are a climate change denier. Fossil fuels are finite, dirty to produce, polluting to use, and make us dependent upon politically unstable areas of the world, as well as forcing us to be under the thumb of the big oil cartel OPEC. And then of course there's the effect of climate change brought about by unlocking millions of tonnes of stored carbons from fossil deposits and spraying it into the paper thin atmosphere of the earth, which is not a good thing.

So, if we could somehow free up the 1.2 billion vehicles in the world (expected to rise to 2 billion by 2035) from reliance on fossil fuels, then the benefits would be numerous.

The problems being that, historically, this has been though of in terms of moving towards battery powered electric vehicles. Whilst the likes of Tesla have proved it's possible to mass-manufacture viable electric vehicles that don't look like milk floats and have a great performance, there's still the issue of how long it takes to charge them.

For example, the Tesla S can do about 232 miles before needing to be recharged, and then would need to be charged for 9.5 hours to get up to full range again. That's fine if you can get to and from your overnight charging point within one 'tank of fuel' but if you happen to be in the middle of nowhere when you need to recharge you might as well bed down for the night. I've already covered potential developments in batteries that could cut that down to a more reasonable three minutes, but what about a technology that's available now?

Hydrogen Fuel Cell  (Source: Olympusmicro.com)

That's where the Hydrogen Fuel Cell comes in. It burns the most abundant element in the universe and gives off electricity and just water as a by-product. Providing hydrogen fuel can be manufactured in sufficient quantities, hydrogen fuel cells can made efficient enough and can be complemented with a network of hydrogen refuelling points, it seems like the future is bright for this technology.

And things are starting to happen for the fuel cell. For example, Toyota has pretty much pledged its future to the production of Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles (FCEVs) and has already started rolling out its first fuel cell powered Toyota Mirai vehicles.

Toyota Mirai

Likewise the Honda FCX Clarity, Nissan FCHV range, Volkswagen Hy-motion range, Mercedes NECAR and F-Cell ranges, and various other manufacturers with hydrogen vehicles already in production or at the proposal stage. In fact, the pretty much the only manufacturer not flirting with the idea is Tesla who are already too far down the track with battery powered electric vehicles and regard the production of hydrogen as being impractical.

Which brings us neatly to the question of production. There are two methods of producing hydrogen in sufficient quantities being toyed with. The first is by cracking hydrocarbons like methane, which has the twin unfortunate by-products of requiring a large amount of electricity to do the cracking and also of releasing too much waste CO2 to really be helpful in reducing greenhouse gasses. The second is by splitting water by electrolysis, which can be done by hydroelectric power stations during low electricity consumption periods or by embedded elctrolysers at refuelling stations.

It's the latter approach that, for example, Aberdeen are employing for their bus network via the HyTrec project; an initiative to convert the traditionally North Sea Oil dependent economy of the city to a sustainable alternative.The HyTrEc project aims to improve access to and advance the adoption of hydrogen as an alternative energy vector across the North Sea Region, spanning places like Aberdeen, Gateshead, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Germany.

Some areas of the world are starting to build up their network of refuelling points too. California's Fuel Cell Partnership, for example, has a network of nearly 60 refuelling stations either already operational or due to launch.

Germany's H2 Mobility is a partnership between fuel companies like Shell, Total and Air Liquide and car companies like Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Hyundai, BMW and Volkswagen aimed at launching hydrogen refuelling stations by the end of 2015.

Now it seems like the UK is looking to follow suit with an H2 Mobility project of its own. It boasts some of the same member company names as in Germany, such as Air Liquide, Honda, Hyundai, Nissan and Toyota but it's also getting backing from places like the Department for Transport and retailers like Morrison's and Sainsbury's.

So it seems like the time for hydrogen powered cars may finally have come. Watch this space.

Cars Are So Much Better Than The Old Days

It's fine to be nostalgic about cars from bygone days, people have fond memories of their first car or their parents cars. People also look at the range of different looking cars produced over the last century and compare them to a snapshot of today's current crop of cars as evidence that cars used to be more varied in styles than they are today, missing the point that the cars of any given year all look the same at the time. But there's no getting away from the fact that cars are vastly better than those of yesteryear.

1970 Ford Escort Mark 1

2015 Ford Focus

Take for example basic specs of a given model. In 1968 Ford introduced the Ford Escort as their affordable everyman's car. It was ultimately replaced by the Ford Focus in 1998 as Ford's affordable everyman market entry. If you compare the specs of the then-and-now equivalents it's amazing to see what you can get for your money today.

To summarise the table below, for around about the same money (adjusted for inflation) you can get a car today that is about twice as fast, twice as powerful, and 50% more efficient with  a whole bunch of safety features and comfort features that everybody expects as standard today but many of which weren't even conceived of in 1970:

As I've already covered, the number of road deaths is about a quarter of what it was in 1970 too, despite there being vastly more cars on the road than back then. That probably has a lot to do with the fact that cars in 1970 had drum breaks, skinny tyres, no seatbelts, no ABS, no side-impact bars and drink driving was common.

So, all in all, cars are immeasurably better than they used to be.

The Dark Days of English Football Are Long Gone

If you follow football then you're never far from a controversy, usually involving cheating, diving, terrible off-field player behaviour or some kind of unsavoury incident involving rival fans. Just recently we've seen a pitch invasion from Villa fans following their win over West Brom, racist chants from Chelsea fans and a spitting incident between a Newcastle Utd and Man Utd players.

It doesn't take long for the press to trot out a 'like the dark days of football' line or some such, But we're a million miles from the bad old days of football. Granted, football today has endemic economic problems of far too much money at the top end and no trickle-down to lower league clubs and grass roots development. There's also more diving and play-acting than days of yore, but these problems seem kinda insignificant when you cast your mind back to the state of football in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s.

For starters, there was the culture of violence and hooliganism which reached a peak by the mid 1980s. Away day match experiences at the time involved a lot of smashing up 'footy special' trains and opposition pubs, invasions of the opposing sections of the ground in an attempt to 'take their end', pitched battles in terraced streets and patches of waste ground, mounted police ploughing into lines of fighting fans, a fashion for fans sporting butchers coats and signing songs about getting your head kicked in or going home in an ambulance.

Take this example from Luton vs Millwall in 1985 for an example of how bad hooliganism had got (see from about 7 mins 45 secs onwards):

Scenes like the following were fairly common, although on the wane by the early 1990s when this one took place, which I witnessed from the back of the away end. There were numerous injuries that day, and one Stoke fan was blinded by a missile outside the ground following an ambush from Birmingham City hooligans as fans tried to get away from the ground:

Then there was the state of the grounds themselves. Football grounds pre-Taylor Report were rusting hulks with crumbling Victorian bricks and concrete. Grounds featured terraces made from a cinder tip or grassy banks, often uncovered, or wooden stands, rusting roofs and crumbling masonry. Male toilets were usually a wall with a gutter behind them to urinate in, usually ankle deep already, and female toilets were few and far between.

The combination of a hooliganism problem out of control, and by now exported to European ties, and an incredibly poorly maintained and unsafe stadium resulted in the Heysel Stadium disaster in 1985 in which 39 fans died, most crushed by a crumbling masonry wall as they tried to flee the violence.

More supporter deaths came in 1985 as celebratory scenes at Bradford's Valley parade ground turned to disaster alarmingly quickly when a fire broke out in the wooden main stand. The fact that fans were packed into a wooden stand in itself is staggering today, but that flammable junk and rubbish was stacked underneath them and that smoking was permitted just blows the mind. Couple that with the fact that fire exits were chained shut - just think about that for a moment - and it doesn't take Einstein to see that a fire like this one that killed 56 and injured at least 265 was bound to happen sooner or later. Just watch the clock to see how quickly scenes of celebration gave way to a raging inferno:

Football fans by the mid 1980s were treated by the authorities like a problem to be contained, not human beings watching a sports event. The behaviour of the significant minority that contributed to the hooligan problem tarred the rest of us with the same brush, meaning that the authorities herded fans about into terraced pens with spiked fences at the front to keep us from kicking lumps from each other. Crushes had happened many times before, such as the Ibrox disaster in 1971 which caused 66 deaths and more than 200 injuries.

The warning signs were there that another serious incident was going to occur due to the way that spectators were squeezed together behind fences like wild animals to be contained. In 1981 at an FA Cup Semi Final between Tottenham and Wolves, 38 supporters were injured in a crush in pens in the very same Leppings Lane end at Sheffield Wednesday's Hillsborough ground that was to become infamous eight years later:

It seems no lessons were learned from that day whatsoever, and sure enough things finally came to a head in 1989 when 96 Liverpool fans were killed in a crush at an FA Cup semi-final match being held at  Hillsborough. Police opened gates into an already over-crowded pen to alleviate a crush outside the ground, with the predictable results that fans at the front who had arrived early to watch the game were crushed to death on fences and barriers:

Following safety recommendations like The Taylor Report into making top flight stadia all-seater, an influx of TV money and an all-round family oriented sanitisation of the game, scenes like those above are now a thing of the past.

Yes, football might have its issues today, and people hanker after the rough-and-ready days of 'real' football, but at least you know if you go and watch a game you'll make it home alive.

Town of 65,000 Generates Heating From 8°C Fjord Waters

The town of Drammen, 40 miles west of Oslo in Norway, has installed a heat pump from a Glaswegian company Star Renewable Energy that allows them to heat most of the town from the near-freezing 8°C waters of the nearby Fjord.

Source: BBC News

One unit of heat costs 1 pence to generate, compared with 3p for biomass, 5p for gas and almost 8p for oil, generating annual savings of around €2m a year and 1.5m tonnes of carbon.

In the UK, the Glaswegian company in question is already working with local housing associations in Glasgow and is speaking with a dozen city councils including Newcastle, Durham, Manchester and Stoke. The company calculates that the Thames river could generate 1.25GW of capacity, enough to heat 500,000 homes.

Top Science Stories of 2015 So Far

The website Futurism.co has created an info-graphic that highlights 20 of the most impressive scientific advancements and discoveries this year so far. You can check out Futurism's interactive version to click through to a source for each story (Source: uk.businessinsider.com).

UK Crime Down Nearly 15% Since 2010

The public's perception of crime levels is notoriously very different to any actual crime figures going on in society. The fear of crime is a very volatile measure of actual criminality, and one which is continually played upon by the tabloid media who stir up the inherent suspicion in the public that crime is escalating out of control. However, the actual crime figures paint a very different picture.

UKCrimeStats is an open data platform of the Economic Policy Centre, a think tank dedicated to "closing the gap between policy and knowledge in new and innovative ways".  They proclaim themselves to be the leading public resource for maps, analysis and reporting of monthly crime data. Their independent data plots an interesting picture of a crime rate which is declining overall:

Source: Figures from UKCrimeStats

As an example, in July 2011 there were 278,738 burglaries reported which was down to 128,596 in January 2015.Criminal Damage & Arson (CD&A) is down from 229,915 in March 2011 to 11,802 in January 2015.

Overall reported crimes is down from 491,730 in December 2010 to 419,603 in January 2015, a reduction of nearly 15%. 

And figures in 2010 were themselves down from a crime high in the 1990's which we reported in a previous blog entry. Back in 1995 there were approximately 19 million offences recorded, as compared to fewer than 8 million by 2013:

Public Health is Better Than Ever

Considering the hammering the NHS gets in the right wing press and at the hands of politicians many of whom, coincidentally, have vested interests in private healthcare firms, you'd be forgiven for thinking that public health in the UK is worse than it used to be. But a cursory glance at historic disease stats shows another story.

Disease rates over time are a function of available treatments, inoculation programmes, health education and front-line healthcare. The NHS has a role in all of those things. So it should take the credit for some of the following stats.

The following graph shows the number of cases of a selection of infectious diseases identified between 1982 and 2013, as taken directly from government statistics (although older stats go back as far as 1912, as discussed below):

Source: Gov.UK NOIDs Statistics

Let's take a few examples in detail:

• Measles - In 1961 there were 763,531 cases of measles. By 2013 that was reduced to just 6,183, which is in itself a small increase since the low of 2,235 in 2010 due to the inaccurate and hysterical MMR jab reporting.
• Mumps - Likewise Mumps spiked in 2005 during the MMR jab hysteria at 56,256 cases and has now been reduced to 10,093 cases by 2013.
• Whooping Cough - In 1961 there were 169,441 cases. By 2013 there were just 3,273 cases, and that's despite a resurgence from a low of just 405 in 2010.
• Viral Hepatitis - In 1982 there were 10,605 cases, which were reduced to the point where no stats were collected by 2013.
• Tuberculosis - In 1912 there were a whopping 110,706 cases of TB reported. By 2013 there were fewer than a tenth of that at 8,087 cases,
• Scarlet Fever - In 1921 there were 137,073 cases. By 2013 there were just 4,642.
• Erysipelas - In 1913 there were 23,260 cases of this horrible looking thing, which I confess I've never even heard of. It disappeared from stats altogether in 1966.
• Diptheria - In 1920 there were 69,481 cases. By 2013 there were 9.
• Smallpox - In 1930 there were 11,839 cases. There hasn't been a case reported since 1978, in which year there were 2.
• Food Poisoning - In 1998 there was a peak of 93,932 cases. By 2013 there were just 15,216 cases.

It's also worth pointing out that the population in 1912 when these stats start was 42 million, whereas today it's heading towards 70 million. So the numbers of disease cases reported at the beginning of the 20th century were vastly higher despite there being nearly half as many people in the UK.

So, despite  constant crisis stories in the press about GPs and Hospitals, public health is actually the best it's ever been. 

NASA's Dawn Probe Achieves First Ever Orbit Around Dwarf Planet

NASA's Dawn probe, launched in 2007, has become the first ever space craft to go into orbit around a dwarf planet. It was captured by the dwarf planet’s Ceres's gravity at about 4:39 AM Pacific Standard Time this morning.

Source: NASA

Having already explored the asteroid Vesta, the Dawn probe will then have investigated two 'protoplanets', which are thought to be the sorts of smaller bodies that collided together to form planets like our own.

Protoplanets have been observed forming from the disk of dust and gas surrounding a star, so to be able to study a protoplanet up close, at about a tenth of the distance between the earth and the moon, will give science the first real chance to understand their make up.

For starters, we'll be interested to know what those mysterious two shiny spots are:

Source: BBC News

And that's no mean feat, considering Ceres is about 400 million km from earth on average and only 950 km across.

This Week's Advances in Medical Research

One area which is rich with stories of progress and positivity is the field of medical research. Take for example the following recent stories from just this last week or so as a measure of how much great work and progress there is going on right now.

There was the story which showed how doctors in Minnesota, USA fitted a bionic eye to a blind man to allow him to see for the first time:

There was also a recent story on how doctors in Liberia think they are very close to ending Ebola in the country. Ebola killed more than 4,000 people in Liberia, but there have been no confirmed new cases in Liberia for a week, defying predictions that half a million Liberians would die from the disease as a result of the outbreak.

There was also a promising story on the new range of targeted cancer drugs which, unlike conventional chemotherapy, which attacks all rapidly dividing cells, targeted drugs focus on the genetic mutations that drive cancer growth. They work by locking the messages from the gene which creates a chemical signal that drives the growth of abnormal cells. It's just one more step towards a truly effective way of treating cancer brought about by the ongoing cancer research battle.

And there was a story about a potential treatment for drug resistant TB, a story about how a substance found in a banned diet pill has been shown to reverse Type 2 diabetes in rats, the development of functional leg muscle material from stem cells, and the world’s first “bionic reconstructions” have been performed on three Austrian men to help them regain hand function.

Not bad for a week or so's worth of medical research.

Average Intelligence has Risen the Equivalent of 20 IQ Points Since 1950

The IQ test is a notoriously narrow measure of intelligence, and even then, it's possible to become more 'test wise' by getting more practice at taking IQ tests, without actually getting more intelligent.

Even so, it seems that the human race is getting collectively better at the sorts of tasks that IQ tests measure. Researchers at Kings College, London have compiled historical IQ test results together and noted a trend whereby overall IQ points per head of population have increased over time.

They analysed data from 405 previous studies from more than 200,000 participants, over 64 years and from 48 countries. They found that, on average, intelligence has risen the equivalent of 20 IQ points since 1950:

Source: BBC News

This may be that because more people globally now go through formal education than they did in the past, meaning that they get more practice in the sort of critical thinking and problem solving that the IQ test measures. It may be that the modern world contains more daily interpretation of signs, symbols and patterns as a part of daily routine. Or it may be from better nutrition and living conditions.

Or maybe humans are just getting cleverer?