Gold hydrogen: An exciting clean fuel or a climate distraction?

Hello, and welcome to our Friday rundown of the biggest news stories covered by New Scientist this week. In this issue, we’ve got antimatter, a cosmic mystery and some ways to keep your brain young. But first – an enticing prospect for clean fuel!

Gold hydrogen: Is there a huge reserve of clean fuel in Earth's crust?

A lot of people are excited about the idea of a previously overlooked wealth of hydrogen fuel lurking underground. This piece by our US environment reporter James Dinneen makes a good case that we should indeed be looking more closely at the possibility. I was surprised to learn that the British Geological Survey hasn’t investigated underground hydrogen for almost 20 years, given our need to find clean energy alternatives to oil and fossil gas. That said, I always get a bit nervous when someone raises the prospect of a seemingly magic solution to our energy and climate change needs, when the reality is that the energy transition we require is going to be a lot of hard work.

Antimatter neutrinos detected from a nuclear reactor 240km away

Our most popular story this week is about an antimatter detector, or more specifically an antineutrino detector. If you know anything about antimatter, it’s probably that it blows up spectacularly when coming into contact with normal matter, so you might wonder how we could safely detect it at all. The answer is that neutrinos, both normal and anti, hardly interact with anything else, so an antineutrino can pass through normal matter without annihilating anything. These particles are produced inside nuclear reactors, so being able to detect them at a distance could one day help with nuclear safety monitoring.

Galaxies’ missing matter may be found – but now there’s too much of it

I love this next story. The hunt for dark matter – stuff we’re pretty sure is out there in the universe, but doesn’t interact with light – gets all the press, but there has also been a more mundane search going on. That’s because half of the universe’s baryonic matter – essentially, all the normal stuff that us, the planets and the stars are made from – seems to be missing, according to our predictions of how much there should be in the universe. Now, it seems we’ve found this missing matter in the form of hot gas surrounding galaxies. There’s just one problem: our models of galactic evolution say there shouldn’t be any matter in these locations. Back to the drawing board for cosmologists, then.

More from New Scientist

• As part of our ongoing Save Britain’s Rivers campaign, I edited this piece by Jason Murugesu looking at the health of the UK’s swimming rivers. As Jason dug into the issue, we were both shocked to discover that there are essentially no requirements for water-quality tests before designating a river as a “bathing water”.
• Our cover feature this week is about a new hypothesis of why our brains age and what we might be able to do to restore neurons once they wear down. There are also some nice tips on how to keep your brain young.
• I’m writing this on a cold and grey day in London, and already thinking about the prospect of sunny holidays to come this year. If you’re looking for the same, check out our New Scientist Discovery tour of the marine ecosystems of the Azores. Book now for May and get some sunshine in your life!

That’s all for this week. If you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, please hit repost to share with your network. Have a great weekend!

Jacob Aron , News Editor