The technology of cloning has been evolving rapidly and the cloning of extinct animals is fast becoming a reality. A major breakthrough occurred in 2008 when Dr Teruhiko Wakayama at the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan successfully managed to clone a mouse from tissue that had been deep-frozen for 16 years using a completely new technique. The same group is now working to clone a mammoth, an animal resembling a large elephant but with shaggy hair.

Mammoths have been extinct for the last 4,500 years but their remains, some 150 million, can be found frozen in Siberia. The Japanese group has now succeeded in extracting mammoth egg cell nuclei. Once they have successfully cloned a mammoth embryo, it is intended to plant it in the womb of a surrogate female elephant for 22 months for the baby mammoth to be born.

Who knows, if this works, we may have the dinosaurs roaming over our planet once again. First solar sail—in space Solar sails, also known as ‘light sails’, are being developed to propel spacecraft using the pressure of radiation from stars or lasers. These are very large ultra-thin mirrors made of polymeric materials which propel the spacecraft forward due to two different forces: the stronger radiation pressure and the weaker solar winds. The radiation pressure is due to the fact that photons (light particles) possess a small amount of momentum. The solar wind pressure is three magnitudes smaller. The acceleration produced by these two forces is very small, even in large solar sails, but since the spacecraft are travelling in a complete vacuum, and there is no resistance except possibly from gravitational forces, the speed of the spacecraft becomes very significant over time.

The first spacecraft to use solar sail technology as the main source of propulsion was IKAROS (Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation of the Sun), of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launched on May 21, 2010. In December 2010, the spacecraft passed the planet Venus, a huge leap forward for the Japanese space programme.

Nasa unfurled a 100-square foot solar sail in low earth orbit recently which will gradually descend to Earth. It may eventually be employed to bring satellites back to Earth before the highly sensitive and secret US technology is ‘stolen’ by other nations.

A new hydrogen fuel—cheaper than fossil fuels

Intensive researches in developing alternative fuels are finally yielding exciting results. Cella Energy in the UK has announced a completely new type of fuel which is based on hydrogen. Liquid hydrogen is an excellent fuel with a specific energy density of 143 megajoules per kg, as compared to kerosene which has much lower energy density (about 43 megajoules per kg).

However, liquid hydrogen has to be stored at -253°C. The advantage in the new hydrogen fuel developed by Cella Energy is that it is in the form of microbeads containing a hydride compound, prepared using nanotechnology. The car engine does not require any modification and the new fuel can be filled from a normal petrol pump.

The synthetic fuel was developed in a highly secret project involving scientists at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford. It is expected to cost about 1.5 dollars per gallon.

Touch screens—from carbon nanotubes

There has been growing demand for touch screens for mobile phones and other devices. The most popular touch screens need to have high transparency in thin screens and excellent conductivity. These ‘capacitative screens’ are made from an element, indium, which is in short supply on our planet.

There has, therefore, been a search for alternatives. Researchers at the Fraunhofer institute in Germany have now developed low cost touch screens made from carbon nanotubes and low cost polymers.

Carbon nanotubes (different from carbon fibers) are extraordinarily strong, although about 50,000 times thinner than a human hair and can have a length of up to 18 centimetres. They are cylindrical carbon molecules with a length to diameter ratio greater than of any other material (about 132 million to 1).

They were developed after the serendipitous discovery of ‘buckyballs’—football-shaped carbon molecules that were discovered by two independent groups led by Prof. Harry Kroto at Sussex University and Prof. Richard Smalley and Robert Curl at Rice University. They were exploring how certain compounds (polycyanoacetylenes) were formed in the stars and ended up heating graphite to high temperatures, resulting in the accidental discovery of football shaped pure carbon molecules. They shared the chemistry Nobel Prize in 1996 for this discovery. Carbon nanotubes have found applications in many fields including electronics, optics and material sciences.

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