The new substance is a "metamaterial" and it has a property called negative refraction. This means that, in theory, the material could be designed so that light would curve around an object made of the material, making the object invisible.

According to David Schurig, an electrical and computer engineering professor at North Carolina State University, "These materials [metamaterials] would comprise a complete -- almost magical -- mastery over light… they would enable… arbitrary control over the richest information channel [light] humans employ."

A Princeton team developed the metamaterial. It currently works with only infrared light, which falls between microwaves and visible light. However, by shrinking the molecular structures, it could, in theory, also work with visible light.

The potential uses are remarkable, and extend far beyond gee-whiz optical illusions or next-generation laser light shows. Metamaterial holds tremendous promise for medical applications.

For example, every kind of particle has an optical signature. "When you breathe out, there are all kinds of chemicals in there," said Claire Gmachl, director of Mid-InfraRed Technologies for Health and the Environment, a research center bringing together universities and companies. "So the material could be used in detectors for medical analysis."

For instance, modern-day Breathalyzer devices can measure alcohol levels. However, many more chemicals are present in exhaled breath than Breathalyzers can measure. By optically detecting and displaying specific chemicals, the new material could potentially be used to measure the efficiency of oxygen absorption and even the presence of chemicals that indicate an imminent heart attack.

The potential is for far greater sensitivity than with today's sensors, which must contact the target particle(s). In addition to breath analysis, I foresee the following uses for metamaterial:

• Testing fermented products such as wine and beer for aging and maturity
• Evaluating readiness of crops for harvest
• Enabling computers to analyze a scent, digitize it and then send it to another computer for reproduction
• Developing a new kind of microscope that could examine individual molecules.

I'll be watching metamaterial for investing possibilities.

Jonathan Kolber
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

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It's different from conventional fuel cells in two ways. First, charcoal is a renewable fuel and (second) the burning works at relatively warm temperatures - warm enough to bake bread.

Most fuel cells are designed to burn hydrogen. It's touted as a "clean fuel" while most think of charcoal as dirty.

Actually, the burning of hydrogen just displaces the pollution. Here's why...

Hydrogen is not widely available in nature in pure collectible form. It takes energy to get it there. The best way to do is by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. But, guess what?

Old-fashioned power plants do that "dirty work." Yes, fuel cell-based vehicles may emit nice water vapors, but the power plants making them possible will still be furiously cranking out carbon dioxide (CO2) hundreds of miles away.

That's why I've never considered fuel cells a real solution to global warming or a true power source. They're more like camouflage for a continued fossil fuel regime.

Dr. Antal's approach is different. He describes it as, "effectively a battery that uses charcoal to make electricity." It doesn't produce soot.

It works at 400 degrees Farenheit. Conventional fuel cells work at approximately 1,500 degrees. The system should be suitable for mid-sized power plants and perhaps even vehicles.

The system works similarly to a battery, except that the positive terminal is filled with charcoal dust and the whole system is under pressure. The negative terminal catalyzes the "battery solution," which causes the charcoal to turn into carbon dioxide and water, thereby releasing energy.

Traditional fossil fuels, such as gasoline, release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that's been deeply trapped underground. That's how they add to atmospheric CO2.

Charcoal, on the other hand, is simply is way of storing carbon dioxide captured by above-ground plants. Burning it releases that CO2 back into the atmosphere for no net gain.

A few challenges remain. Antal's group is working on streamlining the feed of charcoal into the system and optimizing the catalysts and mixtures.

They have also developed a "flash carbonization reactor." It turns all kinds of biomass such as macadamia nut shells, wood and grass into charcoal. A commercial-sized version of this could potentially work in perfect synergy with the new fuel cells.

Let's see if the proponents of fuel cells jump all over this one. Don't be surprised if they ignore it. In any case, large-scale deployment is at minimum five years away.

Jonathan Kolber
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

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By "entirely new" I mean such things as zero-point energy. (I know an esteemed aerospace engineer who attests to having seen one of these operating steadily for two weeks on a tabletop in a black ops project), cold fusion (I know a US Naval Research Laboratory physicist who's catalogued evidence that it's real), hot fusion (I own stock in a company that's achieved 1 billion degrees Celsius), a Tesla-based technology that uses the ionosphere as a capacitor and others.

Meanwhile, what of transitional technologies?

Superior ways to sequester the harmful byproducts of coal-fired plants can extend the life of this hydrocarbon fuel for another century or more - though few of the new plants under construction are planning to use such technologies.

Solar-wind hybrid plants such as the novel "tower of power" now planned for the Australian Outback are another promising possibility, as are solar power satellites: essentially, huge panels of solar cells positioned in space, beaming power to Earth via lasers or microwaves.

Improved ground-based solar cells are another promising transitional technology, with efficiencies of as much as 30% and the potential to be sprayed on like paint.

One much ballyhooed technology that makes little sense is the so-called hydrogen economy. Why? Consider what is required to produce hydrogen as fuel.

It must be extracted from something, usually by splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen. How is this done? You guessed it: An alternative energy source is consumed to generate the power required for splitting. That fuel source will almost always be coal, oil or natural gas. So what's the point?

It's true that hydrogen burns clean wherever it is burned. But you've got to burn a lot of dirty fuel to make this "clean" fuel. Therein lies the rub. Instead of truly reducing global pollution, hydrogen shifts it from populated areas to less populated ones. While this benefit may help to reduce urban smog, it does nothing on balance to reduce the toxic emissions spewing into the earth's atmosphere.

It merely shifts the problems.

A new analysis published on the prestigious Physorg.com shows why hydrogen doesn't now make sense and will not in the future, at least compared with other alternative energy sources.

Ulf Bossel, author of the study, summarized his findings: "More energy is needed to isolate hydrogen from natural compounds than can ever be recovered from its use. Therefore, making the new chemical energy carrier [hydrogen] from natural gas would not make sense, as it would increase the gas consumption and the emission of CO2. Instead, the dwindling fossil fuel reserves must be replaced by energy from renewable sources."

Essentially, his analysis of a hydrogen economy demonstrates that high energy losses are unavoidable, due to the laws of physics. On balance, these mean that a hydrogen economy will never be a viable replacement for fossil fuels.

He states, "The advantages of hydrogen praised by journalists (nontoxic, burns to water, abundance of in the universe, etc.) are misleading, because the production of hydrogen depends on the availability of energy and water, both of which are increasingly rare and may become political issues, as much as oil and natural gas are today."

He blames the "Presidential [hydrogen] Initiative" for substituting politics for science, and argues that a lot of the research now being done is essentially scientists prostituting themselves for directed research grants.

Essentially, the core problem lies in the fact that turning something such as water, biomass or natural gas into hydrogen and then finding a way to transport that hydrogen that's safe (i.e., nonflammable), such as in the form of metal-hydrogen hydrides, consumes more energy than would be used to simply generate electricity in the first place. Both trucks and pipelines are far less efficient means of transporting hydrogen than is the case for natural gas or oil; they are only half as efficient.

Storage is similarly problematic. Hydrogen must be bled off from storage containers to avoid risks of explosions. This means that after two weeks, a car would lose half of its fuel, regardless of whether it's being driven.

Bossel consistently found that the energy input required for extraction, preparation, transportation and execution exceeds the output of alternative energy sources by a factor of three or more. Essentially, this means that at least three times the hydrogen would have to enter the pipeline to do the work of oil with comparable BTU potential.

Regrettably, this is not amenable to technological improvement but is due to the properties of hydrogen itself – specifically its low density and extremely low boiling point, which raises the energy cost of compression or liquefaction and the investment costs of storage.

Can hydrogen be salvaged as a fuel source? I wouldn't bet on it, not unless a transformational breakthrough develops something such as algae that converts biomass directly into hydrogen, and does so in small, easily managed batches near the point of consumption.

Meanwhile, many promising and exciting new alternative energy technologies are moving from the drawing board to early- stage development.

Related Articles:

• A World Based on Uranium Instead of Oil
• Oil Replacing Technologies

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He invented radio (before Guglielmo Marconi), alternating current (which allowed the electric grid), the transistor and hundreds of other things. One of his claims was to have discovered a way to transmit power wirelessly over vast distances. (I know a European physicist who believes he has figured out how this works.)

Now comes a practical application of this through the phenomenon of resonance. Resonance causes an object to vibrate when energy of a certain frequency is applied. Resonance happens when, for example, a tuning fork is struck and other tuning forks also begin to vibrate, or when an opera singer hits a certain note and glass shatters.

According to assistant professor Marin Soljacic of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the researchers behind the work, the complex weaving of cables and plugs needed to recharge today's electronic gadgets could soon be a thing of the past.

It's a relatively simple system, one that could power devices such as laptop computers, cell phones and MP3 players.

It uses well-established physics and could work over large apartments, houses or even greater distances.

While the researchers have not built a working model, their computer models and mathematics suggest it will work. Such models have proven so accurate in recent years that they often substitute for physical experiments.

The challenge in electromagnetic resonance is the tendency of systems to radiate; they scatter energy in all directions, wasting large amounts of it. Consequently, the team focused on a special class of "nonradiative" objects with so-called "long-lived resonances."

Said professor Soljacic, "If you bring another resonant object with the same frequency close enough, the energy can tunnel from one object to another."

For instance, a copper antenna designed to have proper resonance could transfer energy to a laptop with its own antenna resonating at the same frequency. The computer would truly be wireless.

One important feature of the new approach is that any energy not transferred to an appliance is simply reabsorbed.

Another is that, as professor Soljacic points out, "You could also scale it down to the microscopic or nanoscopic world," thereby potentially providing a solution to the question of delivering power to systems, which may themselves be smaller than available wires.

Other approaches to wireless transfer of power have been proposed, including lasers. However, this is the first that appears practical without requiring line-of-sight access.

Potentially, this will change how everyone uses mobile appliances. Beyond computers, cell phones and the like, the technology could work with devices such as flashlights and anything else that is frequently moved from one spot to another.

However, there are some interesting difficulties the researchers have yet to address. For instance, one issue with wireless Internet is the stealing of bandwidth by those who have not paid for it.

The same challenge would likely appear with wireless transfer of power, except with greater significance because of the greater cost and the likelihood that a drain on power would prevent a device from working at all.

Still, within a closed space such as a home or office, this would appear to be a superior solution. On a broader scale, while it might not be possible to place such systems in open places such as airports, I could foresee charging stations being built and offering metered power for all manner of appliances without the need for special adapters.

They would need a way to shield the electromagnetic radiation, but that's not difficult. For example, a Faraday cage -- essentially, a copper wire mesh -- should do the trick.

To your profitable future,

Jonathan Kolber
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

NOTE: Jonathan Kolber is a noted technology analyst and entrepreneur. He often consults to and invests in early-stage technology companies. Jonathan is the editor of The Emerging Capital Report.

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