Therefore please help me persist ...

Help me download non-free scientific papers (typically about $30), or make the day's rent ($20), or just buy me a beer*. Thank you.

Perhaps my prescriptions for the world's problems would be more quickly filled if they were not free. One of these problems is airliners' stratospheric emissions of kerosene-derived oxides: carbon dioxide and water vapour.

The CO2 emissions are a smallish part of total fossil-fuel-derived CO2 emissions, but developing a new generation of airliners fuelled with straight hydrogen wouldn't just solve that relatively small problem. It would also allow faster flights and/or farther ones, because an airliner that, as it takes off, is 40 percent liquid hydrogen by mass has as much energy as one that is 100 percent kerosene. The tanks are larger, but this could be made into an advantage: they could occupy the upper part of the fuselage, so that their contents would shield passengers and crew from cosmic radiation.

None of that is new, and it doesn't solve the problem of high-up water vapour emissions. Water vapour is a greenhouse gas. When our fossil fuel burners emit it, this usually doesn't matter, because they emit it in the troposphere, down where water always promptly rains or snows out, no matter whether it evaporated naturally or was put there by us. It is about as hard to humidify the troposphere by burning hydrocarbons as to make the Zambezi River deeper, just upstream of Victoria Falls, by stationing a firetruck at the base of the cataract and having it drive the flow back up. Stratospheric emissions, though, do not immediately fall back out, and airliners can and do make a lasting difference.

A online auction of an idea for a good solution closed after seven days with no bids. The solution would enable an airliner to take off and land on pure hydrogen, leaving a trail of briefly increased humidity, but once up in the stratosphere, if it flew a route that is already well-travelled, its trail would be one of reduced wetness.

Maybe it's obvious enough that someone else who can work out the details will do so, and disclose them freely. If you want or need to know them, but are not certain that will happen, let me know what opening bid you will put in if I reinstate the auction.

More free stuff: a short 2001 conference paper, and the original web page on boron for surface vehicles, occasionally updated over the past ten years, for instance to discuss related subjects such as VB2-air batteries.

Recently read and remarked

8 Oct 2003 http://pubs.acs.org/cen/80th/print/boron.html
The 1990 Nobel Prize for Chemistry winner discusses boron's role in organic synthesis.
05 Jan 2009 http://www.cmmp.ucl.ac.uk/~nts/metam.html
The manner of presentation compels reluctant belief that the most concentrated solutions of lithium in liquid ammonia, over 20 mole percent, freeze at 88 K, more than 100 K below the freezing point of ammonia itself. Also they are substantially less dense than liquid ammonia, and are the coldest known metallic liquids.
4 Sep 1999 http://members.tripod.com/~IgorIvanov/physics
Good directory to among other things informed discussion of room temperature glass flow (it doesn't).
21 Jul 1999 http://lpi.epfl.ch/fcell1.html Information on fuel cell theoretical efficiency. Methane burned directly has a theoretical limit of 93 percent. However,
... it is impossible to operate a fuel cell to stoichiometric depletion of the fuel stream, as the free energy calculation requires an activity of all involved reagents (Nernst relationship). Up to 10% of the incoming fuel must bypass the electrochemical process and is combusted in an afterburner.
14 Jul 1999 http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/Daedalus.html A transcription of the address by JBS Haldane in which he said renewable energy would be stored as liquid hydrogen and oxygen. And much else besides.
6 Jul 1999 http://powerweb.lerc.nasa.gov/pvsee/publications/mars/marspower.html
Geoffrey A. Landis and Joseph Appelbaum say, at October 1996,
...The conversion efficiency of standard-technology silicon cells currently flown is about 14.5% under standard space conditions ...
GaAs cells have higher efficiency than silicon cells. GaAs cells currently available on the market have an average conversion efficiency of 18.5%. Efficiency of 21.5% has been achieved in the laboratory...
Actually October 1996 is when they put it on the web. On paper it came out in Space Power, Volume 10 Number 2, pp 225-237 (1991).
3 Jul 1999 http://www.silversmithing.com/1fire.htm
Oxygen travels in silver.