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Can you imagine how cool it would be to run a car or a plane off water? Normally we use petrol or diesel to power our cars but they’re not very good for the environment and they actually harm the planet, using water instead would solve a lot of problems. Water is actually made of three atoms; one oxygen and two hydrogens. Normally it swims around pretty happily, but if you use electricity you can split the water apart to make oxygen gas (which we breathe) and hydrogen gas. Hydrogen gas is pretty cool stuff, it’s what they use to power space shuttles, so how great would it be to use it to power your car!? The problem with this stuff however, is that it’s normally a gas and so takes up a lot of space. In fact to drive your car from London to the beach at Bournemouth you would need 600 party balloons of hydrogen! Now it’s not very practical to drive your car around with 600 balloons above your head so instead we have to store it somehow, and that is exactly what I am working on. I am looking at materials that act like sponges to soak up the hydrogen and make it easier to fit in your car (or plane, train, bus, boat, space shuttle, whatever you want really!).

My day (and that of every scientist) normally depends on which experiments are working! In the morning I usually read a couple of science papers to see what other scientists in the world, researching similar things to myself, have been up to. This is really important because as a scientist you always want to do something new, exciting and untested. If someone has already done it then there’s not much point doing it all over again (unless you think they are wrong of course!).

After that I normally go to the lab to do some experiments. Most of my experiments have to be done at very very cold temperatures, otherwise they do not work very well. In fact I have to cool my samples to -320°C! This is pretty chilly if you think the South Pole is only -30ºC. To do this I put on a pair of pretty thick gloves and put my samples in liquid nitrogen, which is one of the coldest substances on Earth. It smokes an awful lot and freezes almost any container you put it in straight away. Then I put my sample on a very expensive machine which (despite my best efforts) I have not managed to break yet, and then measure how much hydrogen it soaks up.