Driving Hydrogen Car Research

While eco-friendly hybrid automobiles gain popularity, researchers are already developing cars with no emissions at all. Powered by hydrogen fuel cells, future automobiles may travel long distances with only water dribbling out of the exhaust pipe. The path to the hydrogen economy isn't smoothly paved though. One big question is whether a safe and practical hydrogen storage system can be built to store enough fuel for long journeys. To that end, UC Berkeley chemist Jeff Long is developing novel nanomaterials for tomorrow's hydrogen fuel tanks.

Seeing Cellular Machinery

A cell is perhaps the most complex factory in the world. The basic structural and functional unit of all life, cells convert nutrients to energy, perform highly specialized tasks based on instructions stored in their DNA, and reproduce themselves. How are these feats accomplished, though? UC Berkeley biologist Eva Nogales is using electron microscopy to watch some of these cellular mechanisms in action.

The Physicist and the SQUID

UC Berkeley scientist John Clarke has spent his career studying SQUIDs. But the SQUIDs that Clarke works with are not the cephalopods of calamari and Jules Verne novels. SQUID is an acronym for Superconducting Quantum Interference Device, a device for detecting incredibly weak magnetic fields. Science's most sensitive energy detecting device, SQUIDs are having a dramatic impact on fields as diverse as medical imaging, cosmology, and computer architecture.

In 2002, Jeffrey R. Long was included in Technology Review magazine's TR100, "a list of 100 innovators 35 or younger whose technologies are poised to make a dramatic impact on our world."