Jack Brouwer, an engineering professor at UCI who’s been working with SoCalGas on the project, told students he doesn’t believe we can reach a net-zero carbon climate without hydrogen. And of the pilot project, he said: “I can guarantee you that it will be safe,” … he noted his teams have been safely handling hydrogen in their laboratories for 25 years. …University spokesman Tom Vasich said via email that the school responded to student concerns by verbally directing SoCalGas to move the project out of student housing and dining facilities.

Often admired for their flawless appearance to the naked eye, crystals can have defects at the nanometer scale, and these imperfections may affect the thermal and heat transport properties of crystalline materials used in a variety of high-technology devices. Employing newly developed electron microscopy techniques, researchers at the University of California, Irvine and other institutions have, for the first time, measured the spectra of phonons – quantum mechanical vibrations in a lattice – at individual crystalline faults, and they discovered the propagation of phonons near the flaws.