June 8th, 2012
© Courtesy of MIT
A researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has engineered a virus that splits hydrogen from oxygen to allow the hydrogen to be captured for use as fuel.
Angela Belcher, the MIT researcher, was Scientific American's 2006 researcher of the year, and Scientific American is reporting the story.
The virus Belcher engineered uses a process similar to photosynthesis in plants to separate the hydrogen in water from the oxygen. Of course, that's still only half the battle. The process would become much more useful if a way could be found to make the hydrogen atoms recombine into H2 molecules.
Hydrogen cars still face a number of obstacles on the way to a marketable, practical automobile. But this breakthrough may help overcome one of those obstacles by eventually providing an easy way to create hydrogen fuel from water.