Powdered Methane Could Help Harness Energy Source

Like This | Video: Discovery Tech

- Most people know methane as a component of natural gas. But chemists in the U.K. have developed a way to create a solid form of the gas that looks like granulated sugar and can be stored and poured.

Methane could power the world. Two methane hydrate deposits off the coast of South Carolina reportedly hold enough natural gas to power the United States for a hundred years. Other estimates say that worldwide methane deposits contain more energy than coal, oil and all other fossil fuels combined.

"There is a huge amount of energy in these resources," said Cooper. "The question is how much of that material can we recover."

Most of that methane is locked inside ice crystals in the Arctic or at the bottom of the ocean, where the pressure is high, the temperature is low, or both, which makes extracting those deposits difficult.

A chunk of white methane hydrate from the ocean depths is ice cold in your hand, but hold a lit match to it and yellow and blue flames rise from the methane released by the melting ice.

Once you get the hydrate to the surface, methane can be difficult and expensive to store and transport, which is where Cooper and his colleagues' work could prove useful.

To store and transport methane it usually has to be cooled down to about -113 degrees Celsius (-171 degrees Fahrenheit) or pressurized around 50 atmospheres, both of which require large amounts of energy and can be dangerous and flammable. Storing methane in a water and silica mix that looks and feels like a powder would make it easier and possibly cheaper to store.

Creating powdered methane is fairly simple. Cooper and his colleagues took dry water, or water mixed with very fine particles of silica, pumped methane into the container, and mixed the dry water and methane gas together with a blender bought at a local store.

The tiny silica particles increase the surface area of the water and make it easier and faster for the methane gas to become absorbed by the water. After about 30 minutes the white powder was fully saturated with methane; one liter of methane gas can be stored in about six grams of powdered methane, roughly the same as in most pressurized containers.

The powdered methane still needs to be held under light pressure and cooler temperatures of about -70 degrees Celsius (-94 degrees F).

Releasing the methane simply requires raising the temperature or decreasing the pressure, said Cooper.

Powdered methane could just be the beginning. Cooper says that the team can store other gases as powders, including hydrogen and carbon dioxide, although under different environmental conditions. Storing CO2 as a powder could make carbon sequestration easier or bring a hydrogen-powered economy closer to realization.

Easily trapping gases like CO2, methane and hydrogen could be useful, but first it has to be economical, said both Cooper and outside experts who are cautious about its expense.

Michael Max, who uses hydrates for desalination at Marine Desalination Systems, echoes Cooper.

"It's an interesting result," said Max. "But we don't see how this could be developed commercially."

Max points to Mitsui Group technology that mechanically presses methane hydrate into pea-sized pebbles, making them more stable for transportation and use. However it's stored and transported, finding a cheaper way to gather, store and transport methane and other gasses may eventually help use alternative natural resources.

"The economics of this are far from obvious," said Cooper. "This is a preliminary result and we have to think hard about the costs involved."

NASA Eyes Nuclear Reactor for Moon Base

The Nuclear Option | Video: Discovery Space

- NASA is tip-toeing once again into what was once called the N-word -- nuclear -- with a technology development program aimed at powering its planned base on the moon.

The goal of the Fission Surface Power Project, which is based at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, is to produce a non-nuclear prototype unit within five years.

NASA's last foray into nuclear technologies was a project that began in 2003 known as Prometheus, which focused on both nuclear propulsion and nuclear-powered generators that ultimately could be used to support a manned mission to Mars and for deep-space probes, such as a mission to Jupiter's ocean-bearing moon Europa.

Prometheus was preceded in the 1950s and 60s by the NERVA, Project Orion and other initiatives.

Prometheus ended, but a small-scale effort to develop a compact, highly autonomous fission reactor as part of the agency's new exploration initiative, Project Constellation, survived. The program aims to return U.S. astronauts to the moon by 2020 and establish a base before moving on to manned missions to Mars and other bodies in the solar system.

Supported at a cost of about $10 million a year, the Fission Surface Power Project this week awarded two contracts for power conversion units, used to turn the heat of nuclear reactions into electricity.

NASA envisions needing a system capable of providing about 40 kilowatts of electricity -- about what's used to power eight average homes in the United States.

It would be launched cold and without radioactive elements until operations were to begin on the lunar surface.

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NASA is thinking about burying the system so the lunar soil can serve as shielding.

The converter design by Sunpower Inc., of Athens, Ohio, uses two opposed piston engines coupled to alternators to produce a total of 12 kilowatts of power. Barber Nichols Inc. of Arvada, Colo., is developing a closed Brayton cycle engine that uses a high-speed turbine and compressor coupled to a rotary alternator. It also generates 12 kilowatts.

The ground system would not use any nuclear materials, said project manager Lee Mason.

"Our goal is to build a technology demonstration unit with all the major components of a fission surface power system and conduct non-nuclear, integrated system testing in a ground-based space simulation facility," he said.

A space-based reactor would have to be much more compact than fission reactors currently operating on Earth and would generate far less power. The agency also is looking at solar-powered technologies, fuel cells and other systems.

Among engineers' challenges are the harsh, radioactive environments and the extreme temperature ranges of space.

The moon's 29.5-day rotational period produces long, cold nights lasting 354 hours, which presents a formidable challenge for solar-powered systems. On Mars, the night-time is just 12 hours, but its distance from sun means only 20 percent of the energy that reaches the moon makes it to Mars.

"As you get further and further out, the missions get longer and longer, and you're going to have to have higher and higher power levels," said John Warren, who oversees the program at NASA headquarters in Washington D.C. "You're probably going to have to have nuclear, and I think that will be recognized not only here in the U.S., but around the world."

World's Most Powerful Magnet Under Construction

Powerful Pull | Video: Discovery Tech

Using the strongest materials known to man, scientists are building the most powerful electromagnet in the world -- one that won't blow up a split second after it's turned on.

The entire magnet will be a combination of coil sets weighing nearly 18,000 pounds and powered by jolts from a massive 1,200-megajoules motor generator. Once activated, the new magnet should be about two million times more powerful than the average refrigerator magnet.

"The new magnet at the High Field Lab is a fantastic leap forwards in terms of our capability as a scientific community to explore materials under extreme conditions," said Ian Fisher, a scientist at Stanford University.

"In several cases one needs to go to these sorts of extremes to fundamentally understand materials" used in high-temperature superconductors and other applications, said Fisher.

The electromagnet consists of two parts. The outer section, or outsert, will be a cylinder, 1.5 meters (4.9 feet) in diameter and 1.5 meters tall, and solid except for a small hole, less than 8 inches wide, bored through the middle.

Inside that hole rests the insert, nine coils made of copper and strengthened with silver wire as thin as 100 atoms across. Together, the copper and silver create the strongest material known to man, according to Greg Boebinger, Director of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Florida. The magnet is being built at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The pressures generated inside the insert will be equivalent to 200 sticks of dynamite going off together, or about 30 times the pressure at the bottom of the ocean.

Very few things can survive those kinds of forces for long -- including the new magnet.

The scientists expect each $20,000 insert to survive about 100 pulses. The $8 million outsert should last about 10,000 pulses. Each time the magnet pulses it bends the copper and silver wires, creating tiny cracks in the metal. The cracks in the copper run into the silver wires, which stops the cracks from spreading.

"It's like reinforced concrete," said Boebinger.

The copper acts like like the concrete, strong and tough. The silver acts like the steel rebars running through the concrete, providing flexibility.

Iran Launches Rocket to Space

Iran Flexes its Muscles

- Iran said on Monday a home-built rocket sent into space in a move that triggered U.S. concern over its possible military applications will be able to take a satellite into low orbit around the Earth.

Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar also vowed that Iran will soon put its own satellite into orbit, after a dummy was sent into space in Sunday's rocket launch.

The development was likely to add to international concerns about Iran's nuclear program, which Western nations fear could be a cover for ambitions to build the atomic bomb although Tehran insists its aims are peaceful.

State television said the Safir (Ambassador) rocket is capable of putting a "light satellite into low earth orbit" between 250 and 500 kilometers (150 and 300 miles) above the Earth.

It showed footage of the rocket launch, saying that the Safir is about 22 meters (72 feet) long, with a diameter of 1.25 meters (a little over four feet) and weighing more than 26 tons.

Iran's most powerful military missile, the Shahab-3, has a diameter of 1.30 meters and measures 17 meters in length.

Sunday's launch raised concerns in Washington that the rocket technology could be diverted to military applications.

"The Iranian development and testing of rockets is troubling and raises further questions about their intentions," White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said.

"This action and dual use possibilities for their ballistic missile program have been a subject of IAEA discussions and are inconsistent with their UN Security Council obligations," he said, referring to the UN nuclear watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency

But the head of the space agency in Israel, which considers the Islamic republic its greatest threat, played down the launch.

"Iran still has a long way to go as far as satellites are concerned and it deliberately exaggerates its air and space successes in order to dissuade Israel or the United States from attacking its nuclear sites," Yitzhak Ben Israel told public radio.

"It is clear that for years Iran has had Shihab-3 ballistic missiles which put Israel within its reach. But the threat posed by Iran comes from its nuclear program and not from its satellites or ballistic missiles."

Initial state media reports in Iran said that the rocket had carried the nation's first home-built satellite Omid (Hope) but this was later denied by officials who said only a test satellite had gone up.

However, the defense minister said on Monday: "Iranian experts can put the national satellite into orbit in the not too distant future."

In February, Iran triggered international concern when it said it had sent a probe into space on the back of a rocket to prepare for a satellite launch, and announced the opening of its space station in a remote western desert.

At that time, officials had said the Omid satellite would be sent into space in May or June.

Reza Taghipour, the head of Iran's space agency, also unveiled plans on Monday for more satellites, including one to be built with and for Islamic countries, state television reported.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has made Iran's scientific development one of the main themes of his presidency, asserting that the country has reached a peak of progress despite international sanctions and no longer needs to depend on foreign states for help.

Iran's claims about its military and technological capabilities are often greeted with scepticism by Western experts.

Trace Arsenic in Water Linked to Diabetes

An Elemental Connection

A new analysis of government data is the first to link low-level arsenic exposure, possibly from drinking water, with Type 2 diabetes, researchers say. The study's limitations make more research necessary. And public water systems were on their way to meeting tougher U.S. arsenic standards as the data were collected.

Still, the analysis of 788 adults' medical tests found a nearly fourfold increase in the risk of diabetes in people with low arsenic concentrations in their urine compared to people with even lower levels.

Previous research outside the United States has linked high levels of arsenic in drinking water with diabetes. It's the link at low levels that's new. The findings appear in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

"The good news is, this is preventable," said lead author Dr. Ana Navas-Acien of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.

New safe drinking water standards may be needed if the findings are duplicated in future studies, Navas-Acien said. She said they've begun a new study of 4,000 people.

Arsenic can get into drinking water naturally when minerals dissolve. It is also an industrial pollutant from coal burning and copper smelting. Utilities use filtration systems to get it out of drinking water.

Seafood also contains nontoxic organic arsenic. The researchers adjusted their analysis for signs of seafood intake and found that people with Type 2 diabetes had 26 percent higher inorganic arsenic levels than people without Type 2 diabetes.

How arsenic could contribute to diabetes is unknown, but prior studies have found impaired insulin secretion in pancreas cells treated with an arsenic compound.

The policy implications of the new findings are unclear, said Molly Kile, an environmental health research scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health. Kile wrote an accompanying editorial in the journal.

"Urinary arsenic reflects exposures from all routes -- air, water and food -- which makes it difficult to track the actual source of arsenic exposure let alone use the results from this study to establish drinking water standards," Kile said.

Also, the findings raise a chicken-and-egg problem, she said, since it's unknown whether diabetes changes the way people metabolize arsenic. It's possible that people with diabetes excrete more arsenic.

The United States lowered arsenic standards for public water systems to 10 parts per billion in 2001 because of known cancer risks. Compliance was required by 2006, years after the study data were collected in 2003 and 2004.

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Nanomaterial Cleans up Broken Fluorescent Bulbs

Messy Breakup

If you break a fluorescent light bulb, you've got a mess on your hands. The bulbs contain mercury, a potent neurotoxin that turns cleanup into a toxic waste management project.

Now, research led by Robert Hurt of Brown University has created a product that absorbs mercury 70 times better than the best available technology. The new sorbent -- made of nanoparticles of the element selenium -- could help clean up after breakages in the home, or during shipping or recycling.

Such a technology is likely to become more critical as people are encouraged to switch from incandescent bulbs to energy-saving fluorescent lighting.

To make the sorbent, the team layered the nano-selenium between a tissue and an impermeable backing layer.

By covering the breakage with the paper for several days, "you can stop almost all of the release," Hurt said. "We think it forms mercury selenide, which is a very stable compound.

Without the paper, the mercury slowly evaporates from the broken bulb over several days. Because the mercury vaporizes, Hurt says, "You are not supposed to vacuum it up. You can distribute the mercury around the house." (EPA's recommendations allow for vacuuming, with some precautions.)

The team proposes that the paper could be included with the packaging for the bulbs, so it could soak up spills that might occur during transit. They presented their results this week at a meeting of the American Chemical Society.

Biodegradable Plastics Are Good for Atmosphere, Too

Seeing Green

- Plastics made from renewable resources such as corn are attractive because they are biodegradable, but recent studies suggest they have the added benefit of generating lower greenhouse gas emissions than conventional petroleum-based plastics.

Jian Yu and Lilian Chen of the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, examined the greenhouse gas emissions associated with producing one type of bioplastic, polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA), made by bacteria growing on corn-based sugar.

The pair examined the potential for making PHA from waste material left over from the production of ethanol from the stalks and leaves of corn plants -- which is not yet done on a commercial scale.

"We count all of the chemicals, fertilizers and fuels. We also count the CO2 released from our process. That includes the direct CO2 from the fermentation part, and the energy part," Yu said. "We tried to bean count so we can understand which part is the major CO2 producer."

The researchers found that PHA production generated the equivalent of 0.49 pounds of carbon dioxide for every pound of plastic, compared to two to three pounds of carbon dioxide for every pound of conventional plastic. They published their results in Environmental Science and Technology.

Other bioplastics look even better. Polylactide (PLA), produced commercially by Minnesota-based NatureWorks, LLC, generates 0.27 pounds of carbon dioxide for every pound of plastic produced, according to results published last year in Industrial Biotechnology.

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Largest Atom-Smasher Runs Successful Test

Up and Running | Video: Discovery Tech

The world's largest particle collider passed its first major tests by firing two beams of protons in opposite directions around a 17-mile (27-kilometer) underground ring Wednesday in what scientists hope is the next great step to understanding the makeup of the universe.

After a series of trial runs, two white dots flashed on a computer screen at 10:26 a.m. (0826 GMT) indicating that the protons had traveled clockwise along the full length of the 4 billion Swiss franc (US$3.8 billion) Large Hadron Collider -- described as the biggest physics experiment in history.

"There it is," project leader Lyn Evans said when the beam completed its lap.

Champagne corks popped in labs as far away as Chicago, where contributing and competing scientists watched the proceedings by satellite.

Five hours later, scientists successfully fired a beam counterclockwise.

Physicists around the world now have much greater power to smash the components of atoms together in attempts to learn about their structure.

"Well done, everybody," said Robert Aymar, director-general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to cheers from the assembled scientists in the collider's control room at the Swiss-French border.

The organization, known by its French acronym CERN, began firing the protons -- a type of subatomic particle -- around the tunnel in stages less than an hour earlier, with the first beam injection at 9:35 a.m. (0735 GMT).

Eventually two beams will be fired at the same time in opposite directions with the aim of recreating conditions a split second after the big bang, which scientists theorize was the massive explosion that created the universe.

"My first thought was relief," said Evans, who has been working on the project since its inception in 1984. "This is a machine of enormous complexity. Things can go wrong at any time. But this morning has been a great start."

He didn't want to set a date, but said that he expected scientists would be able to conduct collisions for their experiments "within a few months."

The collider is designed to push the proton beam close to the speed of light, whizzing 11,000 times a second around the tunnel.

Scientists hope to eventually send two beams of protons through two tubes about the width of fire hoses, speeding through a vacuum that is colder and emptier than outer space. The paths of these beams will cross, and a few protons will collide. The collider's two largest detectors -- essentially huge digital cameras weighing thousands of tons -- are capable of taking millions of snapshots a second.

The CERN experiments could reveal more about "dark matter," antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time. It could also find evidence of the hypothetical particle — the Higgs boson — which is sometimes called the "God particle" because it is believed to give mass to all other particles, and thus to matter that makes up the universe.

The supercooled magnets that guide the proton beam heated slightly in the morning's first test, leading to a pause to recool them before trying the opposite direction.

Particle Smasher's Black Holes Would Be Tiny

Ka-Boom | Video: Discovery Tech

Today officials at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, formally switched on the Large Hadron Collider, the so-called "doomsday machine" under Geneva, Switzerland that will smash protons against protons with so much force that critics say it could create a black hole.

CERN scientists say that a black hole is "virtually impossible." Martin Rees, a U.K. physicist, has put the odds of a CERN black hole at one in 50 million. Cynics have pointed out that those odds are about the same as some state-sponsored lotteries.

But when the fate of the world is at stake any risk is too great a risk, contend two groups, one in the United States and one in Europe, who are suing to stop the LHC from operating. Other people have threatened to take matters into their own hands, issuing death threats to CERN scientists and theoretical physicists.

Frank Wilczek, the 2004 Nobel Prize winner and a professor of theoretical physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is one of the scientists who has received death threats. He points out there are massive black holes and then there are smaller, much less destructive black holes.

According to Wilzcek, fears of an Earth-gobbling black hole are grounded in the popular idea that all black holes are galactic monsters just waiting for the chance to gobble up any nearby star or planet that gets too close.

While supermassive black holes, like the one at the center of our galaxy, do gobble up stars and planets, microscopic black holes, like the ones the LHC could create, would look and act completely differently.

"It's like we only had one word for every animal out there," said Wilczek. "It's like they had elephants in mind when they came up with the word 'animal.' But little amoebas are animals too."

"The word is the same but the object is very different from the standard image that people think of."

If (and that remains a big "if") the LHC creates a black hole it will be extremely tiny, much smaller than a single atom, said Wilzcek. Its mass will be the same as the two protons that created it. Its range will be small -- only a few times the diameter of the two protons.

According to Wilczek, that's too small for the baby black hole to eat enough particles to grow to any real size. With no food, the black hole will simply wink out of existence in a fraction of a second.

To create a stable black hole, one capable of consuming the Earth, the black hole would have to be several hundred tons. A LHC-generated black hole would weigh a tiny fraction of a gram.

So what impact would a small, LHC-generated black hole have?

Virus-Based Batteries: Tiny, Flexible, Cheap?

Don't Worry, It's Not Contagious... | Video: Discovery Tech

- A virus-ridden computer without a noticeable battery might not sell on Ebay, but that's exactly what researchers at MIT could build, thanks to a new advance in battery technology.

By pouring a mixture of the harmless, genetically engineered M13 virus and the metal cobalt over stamped silicon film, Angela Belcher and her colleagues created a flexible, microscopic battery that could be cheaply mass produced.

In theory, it could turn virtually any surface -- from large computers to tiny implanted detectors for cancer or heart disease -- into an energy-storing device.

"The idea of using stamping technique to produce a battery is pretty different," said Belcher. "We can make the batteries really small, which lets us put a power source on all sorts of tiny sensors."

Belcher and her colleagues created the first virus-powered battery in 2006. Since then they have been refining their viral battery while working to create other novel energy-storing devices that could be woven into fabrics or poured into containers.

Their most recent advance, detailed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, involves stamping a base material, in this case silicon, so that the negatively charged M13 virus and positively charged cobalt can self-assemble based on their relative charges and the pattern of the stamp.

Stamping the base materials, which can theoretically be nearly any surface, means that the batteries can be produced more cheaply and efficiently. With silicon as the base material, flexible and curved batteries can be created as well.

The Human Tongue as Computer Control Pad

A Joystick Like No Other | Video: Discovery Tech

- The tireless tongue already controls taste and speech, helps kiss and swallow and fights germs. Now scientists hope to add one more ability to the mouthy muscle, and turn it into a computer control pad.

Georgia Tech researchers believe a magnetic, tongue-powered system could transform a disabled person's mouth into a virtual computer, teeth into a keyboard -- and tongue into the key that manipulates it all.

"You could have full control over your environment by just being able to move your tongue," said Maysam Ghovanloo, a Georgia Tech assistant professor who leads the team's research.

The group's Tongue Drive System turns the tongue into a joystick of sorts, allowing the disabled to manipulate wheelchairs, manage home appliances and control computers. The work still has a ways to go -- one potential user called the design "grotesque" -- but early tests are encouraging.

The system is far from the first that seeks a new way to control electronics through facial movements. But disabled advocates have particularly high hopes that the tongue could prove the most effective.

"This could give you an almost infinite number of switches and options for communication," said Mike Jones, a vice president of research and technology at the Shepherd Center, an Atlanta rehabilitation hospital. "It's easy, and somebody could learn an entirely different language."

That's quite a contrast to the handful of methods already available to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who are disabled from the neck down.

The "sip and puff" technique, which lets people issue commands by inhaling and exhaling into a tube, is among the most popular. But it offers users only four different commands, limiting their options.

Control systems that use sophisticated pads to measure neck and head movements are also widespread, but using the hardware can be tiring, and frustrating on smaller electronics like computers.

And while newer innovations that track eye movement are promising, they can be costly, slow and susceptible to mixed signals.

Wiggling Plastic at River Bottom to Generate Electricity

Harnessing This | Watch Discovery Tech Video

For centuries humans have dammed rivers and streams to grind grain and later, generate electricity. Now a new, more subtle form of freshwater power is about to make its debut in the old steel town of Vandergrift, Penn.

Using a grid of electricity-generating smart materials on the bottom of the Kiskiminetas River, combined with a host of energy conservation efforts, Vandergrift hopes to generate between 20 and 40 percent of the city center's electricity.

"Vandergrift is trying to be the model green town," said Lisa Weiland, a scientist at the University of Pittsburgh who is involved in the project.

Vandergrift, which is northeast of Pittsburgh, was originally supposed to be the model steel town, but now, as Weiland says, it is "reinventing itself and going for sustainability."

That sustainable power will most likely come from a grid of undulating strips made of polyvinylidene fluoride or PVDF, a material that generates a slight electrical current when it is moved, in this case, by the currents and eddies in the Kiskiminetas River. Such materials are described as piezoelectric, and the resulting electrical current would pass to small substations along the river's edge before charging a group of batteries.

"There are other materials that give better performance or have higher energy densities," said Weiland. "But we're willing to sacrifice a little power to keep the ecosystem happy."

The Kiskiminetas River, or the Kiski, as it's more informally known, is about 40 yards wide where it passes Vandergrift. Weiland currently plans to lay a grid, 30 yards wide and about a mile long, down on the river bed to help power the city.

The exact details about how dense the grid would be, how long the PVDF strips will be, or even when the grid would be laid down, are still being worked out. But whatever the final plans are, the researchers claim they will maintain the health and appearance of the Kiski, which is used for fishing, canoe trips and other recreational activities.

6-D Holograms Interact With Light

Upping the Hologram Ante | Video: Discovery Tech

- The basic technology used in cheap 3-D postcards and novelty items has been adapted to create six-dimensional images that respond to changes in light and the viewer's direction.

While the display is still pretty small, 7-by-7 pixels, the researchers hope that within the next two to three years they could scale it up to create some of the most realistic images available.

"We are the first ones to build a display that changes with lighting," said Ramesh Raskar, a scientist at MIT who helped to develop the technology. "We've finally found a way to build the most realistic display."

The idea is similar to the technology used on stiff, cheap plastic postcards, the kind when rotated cause an image to move or make it 3-D.

Those postcards' technology works because a series of raised parallel lines create tiny lenses that project different images at either vertical or horizontal angles. The effect can make an image of a car appear like it's moving down a road or a hand appear like it's waving as you tilt the card one way and then another.

Instead of using parallel lines to create the image, the researchers used squares to create lenses that present different images at both vertical and horizontal angles simultaneously.

It's not all about the light coming out of the display though. Unlike a TV, where information only goes in one direction, the 6-D display would respond to changes in the illumination around it, like passing shadows or bright highlights.

Imagine two flowers side by side, one real, one holographic, says Raskar. Then shine a flashlight on them both.

"They would both look real," said Raskar. "But if you shine a flashlight on the hologram, light would pass right through it while the real flower would change in response to the light."

Using their new technology, the image the scientists create would actually respond to light like a real flower would.

Helicopters Learn Tricks 'Watching' Other Helicopters

Look! No Pilot | Video: Discovery Tech

- Birds learn to fly by watching other birds. Now helicopters can watch each other to learn complex aerial tricks and maneuvers.

In 10 minutes, a computer algorithm developed by Stanford University scientists learned, and then flawlessly replicated, more than 20 years of radio-controlled helicopter expertise.

The team has already been approached by private companies who want to use the software, which isn't specific to helicopters, to create helicopters that could monitor humanitarian disasters, track wildfires or locate land mines.

"The goal was to take an off-the-shelf helicopter and write a program to fly it as good as an expert," said Adam Coates, one of the scientist involved in the project.

"We are now more accurate and consistent than an expert human-piloted helicopter," said Pieter Abbeel, another Stanford scientist involved with the project.

Coates and Abbeel, along with their advisor, Andrew Ng, worked with helicopters because of the challenge they present. Helicopters, according to the researchers, are inherently unstable.

"The dynamics of helicopter flight are incredibly complicated; blades are flexing, air is churning, etc.," said Coates. "It's simply too complex for us to map out mathematically."

Instead of trying to write a program that would teach the helicopters, they wrote a program that lets the computers teach themselves, using data gathered from a host of sensors and equipment.

The helicopters themselves are equipped with accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers which monitor a helicopter's speed, acceleration, direction and a host of other variables.

Ground-based video and positioning instruments gather more data about the helicopter's performance. All of the data from ground and air are then fed into a computer for analysis. A larger helicopter could carry the entire instrument and analysis package.

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Lasers to Help Capture 'Movies' of Changing Universe

Lasers to Fine-Tune This | Video: Discovery Space

- Scientists are using new laser technology to improve the precision of telescopes, bringing the dream of watching the expansion of the universe in real time within reach.

Published in the latest edition of Science, the researchers, including Swinburne University astronomer Michael Murphy, show how a laser frequency comb can be used to calibrate an infra-red telescope.

This will allow astronomers to more precisely measure features of distant galaxies and stars.

The comb was developed by co-author Theodor Hansch, of the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics who is a joint winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Physics for the technology.

The comb emits pulses of light several femtoseconds in duration (a quadrillionth of a second) across a range of regularly spaced wavelengths.

"It just so happens when you link your laser frequency comb up to an atomic clock you know what those spacings are to an extremely high level of precision," said Murphy, who is based at the Center for Astrophysics and Supercomputing.

When the technology is applied to the telescope, he explained, it gives "you a ruler that measures wavelengths and you can measure how quickly things are moving."

Murphy, who is one of the chief instigators of the research, says the team succeeded in calibrating the German Vacuum Tower Telescope, an infrared telescope used to track the movement of clouds of gas on the sun.

He says it is currently difficult to calibrate telescopes in the infrared spectrum below 10 meters per second. However by using the new technique, the team managed to achieve nine meters per second calibration.

Most Powerful Atom Smasher Coming Alive

Physics in Wonderland | Video: Discovery Tech

- It has been called an Alice in Wonderland investigation into the makeup of the universe -- or dangerous tampering with nature that could spell doomsday.

Whatever the case, the most powerful atom-smasher ever built comes online Wednesday, eagerly anticipated by scientists worldwide who have awaited this moment for two decades.

The multibillion-dollar Large Hadron Collider will explore the tiniest particles and come ever closer to re-enacting the Big Bang, the theory that a colossal explosion created the universe.

The machine at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, promises scientists a closer look at the makeup of matter, filling in gaps in knowledge or possibly reshaping theories.

The first beams of protons will be fired around the 17-mile tunnel to test the controlling strength of the world's largest superconducting magnets. It will still be about a month before beams traveling in opposite directions are brought together in collisions that some skeptics fear could create micro "black holes" and endanger the planet.

The project has attracted researchers of 80 nationalities, some 1,200 of them from the United States, which contributed $531 million of the project's price tag of nearly $4 billion.

"This only happens once a generation," said Katie Yurkewicz, spokeswoman for the U.S. contingent at the CERN project. "People are certainly very excited."

The collider at Fermilab outside Chicago could beat CERN to some discoveries, but the Geneva equipment, generating seven times more energy than Fermilab, will give it big advantages.

The CERN collider is designed to push the proton beam close to the speed of light, whizzing 11,000 times a second around the tunnel 150 to 500 feet under the bucolic countryside on the French-Swiss border.

Once the beam is successfully fired counterclockwise, a clockwise test will follow. Then the scientists will aim the beams at each other so that protons collide, shattering into fragments and releasing energy under the gaze of detectors filling cathedral-sized caverns at points along the tunnel.

Hawking Bets Collider Won't Find 'God Particle'

- Renowned British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has bet $100 that a mega-experiment this week will not find an elusive particle seen as a holy grail of cosmic science, he said Tuesday.

In the most complex scientific experiment ever undertaken, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be switched on Wednesday, accelerating sub-atomic particles to nearly the speed of light before smashing them together.

"The LHC will increase the energy at which we can study particle interactions by a factor of four. According to present thinking, this should be enough to discover the Higgs particle," Hawking told BBC radio.

"I think it will be much more exciting if we don't find the Higgs. That will show something is wrong, and we need to think again. I have a bet of $100 that we won't find the Higgs," added Hawking, whose books including "A Brief History of Time" have sought to popularise study of stellar physics.

On Wednesday the first protons will be injected into a 27-kilometer (16.9-mile) ring-shaped tunnel, straddling the Swiss-French border at the headquarters of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).

Physicists have long puzzled over how particles acquire mass. In 1964, a British physicist, Peter Higgs, came up with this idea: there must exist a background field that would act rather like treacle.