Sci-Fiction vs Science Fact

Sci-fiction vs science fact – the future could be closer than you think

The television schedule for the last three decades has been littered with programmes that attempted to depict the future. Films such as Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica used guesswork to predict what space travel would be like, and dedicated shows like Tomorrows World featured inventions and guesstimates as to how our lives would be after the new millennium had started.

Well, the new millennium is here and we’re not quite where they predicted we would be. We’re not vacationing on the moon and skateboards don’t yet hover, but there are some significant advances that have been made that may have escaped your radar.

A vision of the future

In the future, our cars may no longer pollute the atmosphere. At least that is a possibility thanks to cutting edge research taking place at the University of Leicester. Here scientists are among a handful across the world helping to turn science fiction into a fact of the future through the science of nanotechnology.

We all know that petrol-fuelled cars are not an ideal solution. They are bad for the environment, expensive to run and oil is too often used as a weapon of war or questionable world politics. Hydrogen is a clean, non-polluting fuel which is available in abundance, obtainable from simple sea water. The problem is storing it safely in sufficient quantities.

Nanotechnology could enable hydrogen to be stored as a gas in a metallic sponge weighing a just few kilos, capable of powering a car over similar distances to a conventional petrol tank.