Highly read on pubs.acs.org in January

Silicon reacts extremely slowly with water to produce hydrogen gas, but 10-nanometre-wide silicon particles react 1,000 times faster.

Mark Swihart, Paras Prasad and their colleagues at the State University of New York at Buffalo report that 1 gram of powdered silicon can generate about 2 litres of hydrogen in about 45 seconds — a rate that is sufficient for systems to produce hydrogen fuel on demand from water.

The authors say that the process they used to generate the silicon powders — breaking up silane gas with lasers — can produce kilograms of powder in an hour, which may mean that the process has the potential to move beyond niche applications.

Nano Lett. 13, 451–456 (2013)