HYDROGEN STORAGE IN NANOTUBES. Hydrogen is a potent fuel: combined with oxygen it can power spacecraft to the Moon. Storing such a dangerous substance, however, is difficult. Physicists at MIT have now succeeded in canning hydrogen inside carbon nanotubes. Actually, hydrogen sausage has been encased in a carbon skin before, but the MIT efforts are the first to achieve reliably such a high hydrogen uptake (one hydrogen for every two carbons) at room temperature. And like a jack-in-the-box, the hydrogens came shooting out of the tubes (80% of them anyway) when the packing pressure was relaxed. (Liu et al., Science, 5 November 1999.)