Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Future Proof with Jonathan McRae. Proudly supported by Research Ireland. On Newstalk.
Hello and welcome to Future Proof, the podcast. This is the show where we take a closer look at the world around us. I'm Jonathan McRae. Thank you for subscribing, downloading and rating. Coming up on this week's programme, we're going to be talking about learning while you sleep.
Because there's some research to suggest that you might be able to pick up a new skill or learn a new language, potentially even quit smoking. while you're asleep. And this is something that, an idea that's been around for nearly 100 years. But new research suggests it could be possible.
First, though, it's time to look back at some of the more interesting stories from the world of science this week. We're joined by Dr. Ruth Freeman from Research Ireland and Professor Annie Curtis of RCSI. Ruth, our first story has to do with white hydrogen. What is that?
Well, you'd be surprised. There's lots of different colours of hydrogen that we talk about now, not the hydrogen itself, which is a clear gas, but really how it's produced. So people might have heard of Blue hydrogen, which is made from natural gas, where you capture the CO2 back. So that's seen as one form of quite clean hydrogen.
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Chapter 2: How can learning during sleep potentially improve skills?
There's also green hydrogen, which is made from splitting water using renewable electricity. But actually, most of the hydrogen that's used for fertilizer production is grey hydrogen, which is made from natural gas without capturing the carbon back. But this story is about white hydrogen and white hydrogen, sometimes called gold hydrogen, is naturally produced inside the Earth.
And so it comes from various different geological processes. The most well studied way that this is formed is from serpentinisation, which is a reaction where water interacts with iron rich rocks deep inside the Earth. And so we've always known these deposits were there. But we've always thought they were just too small and too difficult to extract to make white hydrogen a potential fuel source.
So just to be clear, the hydrogen itself is just normal hydrogen.
Yes.
We're calling white because we're talking about green fuels. Yeah, OK.
Yeah, the colour just refers to how it's produced. But it was back in 2012, there was a hydrogen reserve found in Mali and that natural reserve has been used since about 2012 to power a whole village because it's a natural reservoir where the hydrogen is very clean and it's actually slightly renewing as well as a pool of hydrogen. So that's been used. So the number of companies now exploring...
looking for potential clean hydrogen deposits has gone up. And this is new research from the University of Toronto. It was published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences this week.
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Chapter 3: What does recent research say about learning while you sleep?
And what they've done here is they've gone to a mine in Ontario and they've come up with a new way of measuring this hydrogen reserve. So they did a number of boreholes around the mine and took a lot of measurements and they were able to estimate the flow of hydrogen coming out And it's about eight kilograms of hydrogen annually per borehole.
It doesn't sound like a lot, but they did about 15,000 boreholes. So when you add all of that together, they estimate there could be over 140 tons of hydrogen produced each year. And that is enough to generate nearly five kilowatts of energy, which would be enough to power about 400 homes. or indeed to power the mine, which is very, very close to where they've done this exploration.
So this is very interesting because the way that they've actually identified how much hydrogen is there and how they could potentially extract it does open up opportunities in other areas where we think there is probably hydrogen and that it could be extracted. And, you know, there is a lot of hydrogen under the earth. So the U.S. Geological Survey estimates there could be more than $5 trillion
metric tons of this kind of hydrogen around the world. And obviously only a tiny amount of that could be recoverable.
But don't tell me what the, I mean, like nothing's for free. Nothing's for free in this life. I mean, obviously hydrogen is a clean fuel, but is it a bad idea to be boring 15,000 holes in a mine and just letting hydrogen that was there for millions of years to sort of seep out? Have we thought about this properly?
I mean, it is a finite resource still. This is built up over billions of years, just like fossil fuels.
But I guess if you think about the situation that we're in where we need time, even if we could only get one or two percent of this hydrogen out from under the earth and use it, that would be all our power needs for the next 200 years, even if you projected the increase in demand for electricity. Right.
You know, there may be certain areas, there's certain geological formations where there might be hydrogen that could be tapped into. And I mean, the market would suggest people think it's viable because the number of companies trying to find it has gone up quite significantly.
Wow, like a local hydrogen stream just powering your village would be pretty cool. As long as, you know, it's safe, it's not a dangerous fuel, and it's clean as well. So, interesting. Our second story has to do with sleep, Annie.
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