Japan's cherry blossom stone is a natural wonder

Meet the cherry blossom stone from Japan - one of the most striking natural rock formations in the world.

So-called because when you crack them open, their internal cross-sections look like tiny golden-pink flowers, cherry blossom stones (sakura ishi in Japanese) get their beautiful patterns frommica, which is a commonly found silicate mineral known for its shiny, light-reflecting surface. 

These flower patterns weren’t always made of mica. They started their existence as a complex matrix of six prism-shaped crystal deposits of a magnesium-iron-aluminium composite calledcordierite, radiating out from a single dumbbell-shaped crystal made from a magnesium-aluminium-silicate composite called indialite in the centre. 

Hosted inside a fine-grained type of rock called a hornfels - formed underground around 100 million years ago by the intense heat of molten lava - cherry blossom stones underwent a second significant metamorphosis in their geological lifespan when they were exposed to a type of hot water called hydrothermal fluids. These fluids altered the chemical composition of minerals inside the cherry blossom stones, causing mica to replace the original cordierite-indialite inclusion.

Because they have to undergo two intense and very specific types of metamorphosis in order to form, cherry blossom stones are incredibly rare, and found - rather serendipitously - only in central Japan.  

Not all cherry blossom stones experienced a complete replacement of their internal minerals during their geological lifetime, but those that did are quite delicate inside, according to a 2006 study published by the journal Rocks & Minerals by John Rakovan from the Department of Geology at Miami University in the US. Rakovan reports:

"They can easily be snapped in half or crushed between one’s fingers. Although they are delicate, complete crystals, showing well-preserved external morphology, are commonly found weathered out of the hornfels. In areas where the cordierite is completely replaced by mica the hornfels is also altered such that it is very friable and poorly consolidated.”

In order to preserve the beauty of their delicate mica patterns, the Japanese locals coat them in a diluted solution of wood glue mixed with water to keep everything in place. Unlike the living cherry blossoms, or sakura, that come and go so quickly each year in Japan, these pretty minerals live on as long as the glue holds.

"Although the sakura are ephemeral in their beauty, lasting only a few weeks each year,” says Rakovan, "their image has been set in stone in the sakura ishi of Kameoka."

Gallery: Meet China's baby-shaped pears and heart-shaped melons

Baby-shaped pears, heart-shaped watermelons and square apples are hitting supermarkets in China and Japan. But are these fruits just frivolous fun?

Since the beginnings of agriculture, humans have been customising their fruits and vegetables to suit their needs. Early on, bigger fruits and higher yields were the most important considerations,and while these factors still outweigh the actual taste factor, other, slightly less pressing desires have come into play over the past decade or so.

Namely, people want to eat fruit that doesn’t look like regular fruit.

Which is how baby-shaped pears have come into existence. Grown by China-based manufacturing company, Fruit Mould Co., these strange little shapes have been selling like crazy in China, along with square-shaped apples, and heart-shaped watermelons and cucumbers. Their Buddha-shaped pears are apparently extremely popular.

The way these fruits are created, says Carl Engelking at Discover Magazine, is by placing very young fruits - still attached to their vines or branches - into a plastic mould. The moulds are then clamped shut with screws and shielded from direct sunlight using a sheet of tough, water-proof paper.

At a certain point in the fruit’s maturity, the mould can be removed and the fruit will continue growing into the desired shape. This last bit can be very tricky, and farmers have spent many years getting the final shapes right. According to Brian Ashcraft at Kotaku, it took farmers in Japan three years to perfect their version of the heart-shaped watermelon.

While this all looks like some frivolous fun, there is the opportunity to apply practical applications to this technology. Packing round fruits for transportation, storage, and display in supermarkets takes up lots of space, which means more money and trucks on the road, and securing their roly-poly shapes in trucks and display spaces takes time. The square watermelon idea originally came to be because Japanese supermarkets don't have a lot of room to display their large, round shapes, so local farmers developed easily-stackable square ones. Of course, they're around three times more expensive than regular watermelons, presumably due to the amount of work that went into their development, but as the technology ages, the prices should eventually come down.

Australian scientists may have found the key to controlling fruit flies without pesticides

Bad news for female fruit flies - scientists have identified the moment the insects determine their sex, which is an important step towards creating sterile, all-male populations.

Each year the Queensland fruit fly costs fruit and vegetable producers millions of dollars in damage, but Australian scientists may now have found the key to controlling them without dangerous chemicals.

Researchers at the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment at the University of Western Sydney and the University of New South Wales have identified the exact time when a fruit fly becomes either male or female.

Using this knowledge, the scientists are now working on mass producing generations of sterile male fruit flies, which can be released into the wild to help naturally suppress the population.

"Understanding the mechanisms and timing of how insects become either male or female is critical for the development of new bacterial or genetic approaches to pest control," lead author of the study, Dr Jennifer Morrow from the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, said in a press release.

The main chemical currently used to control populations is fenthion, which is about to be phased out due to concerns over health risks to humans.

The research, published in Insect Molecular Biology, looked into when genes that trigger sex determining proteins were switched on in fruit fly embryos. Using this information, the scientists found that a fruit fly’s gender is decided shortly after eggs are laid into fruit, in the early hours of embryonic development.

The challenge is now how to mass produce male-only lines.

"Our research significantly adds to understanding the key process of sex determination in this destructive crop pest. This knowledge could enable the industry to develop fruit fly lines that can be used to produce male-only broods in huge quantities. They may be intrinsically sterile or may be sterilised before release, for example by gamma irradiation," Morrow explained.

By combining these male-only lines with the use of damaging bacteria that’s passed down through fruit fly generations, such as Wolbachia, the researchers believe they’ll be able to find new, environmentally friendly ways to control the population.

WATCH: These parasites want to take up residence in your eyes

Meet the parasites that can crawl under your skin and into your eyes to leave you blind.

A parasitic worm called Onchocerca volvulus affects 25 million people around the world in one of the most revolting ways possible. The larvae of this tiny worm, found in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, can live for more than 10 years in a person’s skin, and that’s not even the worst part - they often make their way into their eyes.

According to Tommy Leung, a lecturer in parasitology and evolutionary biology at Australia's University of New England, nearly a third of the people affected by Onchocerca larvae will end up with one of these parasites in their eye, at which point they’re at serious risk of blind due to the infection.

And unfortunately, Onchocerca aren’t the only eye-loving parasites out there. As Leung explains at the Conversation, parasitic flatworms called Oculatrema hippopotami live under the eyelids of African hippopotamuses, and parasitic flukes called Philophthalmidae are notorious for feeding on the tears of birds. Flukes are a type of primitive flatworm, found all over the world and ranging from a few millimetres to several centimetres long. There are more than 10,000 known species of flukes, and several of them live inside the guts of birds, laying eggs that are distributed in their host’s droppings. When these eggs hatch, in order to reproduce, these new flukes have to somehow make their way back into a bird’s gut.

Which is where the eyes come into play.

While it might seem like a bad idea for a parasite to damage their hosts - if your host goes blind and dies, you’re going to have to find a new host, and no one likes moving - for flukes, it’s a necessary step towards completing their lifecycle. Flukes attempt to make their way into the body of a bird’s prey, such as a fish or a snail, and partially blind them, handicapping their ability to hide from predators. When the bird eats the prey, it also eats the fluke, and the fluke has fulfilled its mission to get to a bird’s gut and have babies.

But for some animals, strangely enough, having a parasite in the eye doesn’t seem to affect them a whole bunch. "The Greenland shark is infected by the parasite Ommatokoita elongata which plunges a pair of modified limbs straight into the shark’s eyeball and feeds by grazing on its cornea. As unpleasant as it sounds, the shark does not seem too affected by the parasite’s intrusive presence,” says Leung at the Conversation.

Watch the video above to see a freshwater fish from New Zealand called a bully dealing with a large larval fluke in its eyeball.

A magnified fern looks BIZARRE. Shot by Igor Siwanowicz, this image shows the plant's spore-filled sporangia - enclosures where spores are formed - and specialised protective hairs called paraphyses.

BEAUTIFUL ISN'T IT?

In Japan, firefly squid - or hotaru ika, as the locals call them - rise 600 metres (2,000 feet) to the surface of the water and light it up with their electric blue bioluminescence. 

When pallasite meteorites are sliced open and polished, a matrix of stunning yellow crystals are revealed. This specimen was found in 1951 by a farmer in a town called Esquel in the Argentine Patagonia.

WATCH: How do driverless cars work?

Forget adaptive cruise control and parking assist, by 2020 you could have a completely self-driving car. Find out how they work in the latest episode of RiAus's A Week in Science.

Manufacturers say driverless cars will be in stores by 2020, so it's time we wrapped our heads around how they work, and what they might mean for the environment and society. 

Prototypes from Nissan, Volvo, Audi and Google use a variety of sensors mounted on the cars to produce a detailed picture of their surroundings. One of the main sensors they use is a type of laser that sends out rapid pulses of non-visible light and measures the time they take to bounce off objects and return. Because light moves at a constant speed, the car’s distance from that object can be calculated and used to build a 3D image of its environment. 

The data from this laser is also combined with video and radar sensor information picked up by the car, and is processed by a self-learning, onboard computer that decides when to steer, break, and accelerate. 

Which all sounds pretty good, and benefits of this technology have already been identified, such as giving mobility to those who can’t drive traditional cars, and removing the risk of human error, which is the cause of 90 percent of traffic accidents in Australia. But what are the risks? Watch the latest episode of RiAus’s A Week in Science above to find out.

Alzheimer’s patients to be treated with the blood of under-30s

Alzheimer’s patients in the US will be given transfusions of young people's blood as part of a promising new treatment that’s nowhere near as crazy as it sounds.

This October, people with mild to moderate levels of Alzheimer’s disease will receive a transfusion of blood plasma from donors aged under 30. 

The trial, run by researchers at the Stanford School of Medicine in the US, follows their revolutionary study involving lab mice, where the blood plasma of young mice was injected into old mice, resulting in a marked improvement in their physical endurance and cognitive function.Completed earlier this year, their research, combined with independent studies by a handful of research teams around the world, pin-pointed a plasma-borne protein called growth differentiation factor 11 - or GDF11 - as a key factor in the young blood’s powers of rejuvenation.

"We saw these astounding effects,” lead researcher and professor of neurology at Stanford, Tony Wyss-Coray, told Helen Thomson at New Scientist. "The human blood had beneficial effects on every organ we've studied so far."

Getting approval for their October trial has been fairly straightforward, he said, because blood transfusion therapy has such a long history of safe use in medical procedures, but the team will still keep a very careful eye on how the patients are progressing once they’ve received the young blood. "We will assess cognitive function immediately before and for several days after the transfusion, as well as tracking each person for a few months to see if any of their family or carers report any positive effects," he told Thomson at New Scientist. "The effects might be transient, but even if it's just for a day it is a proof of concept that is worth pursuing.”

Without wanting to get ahead of ourselves just yet, if the trial ends up being a raging success and the Stanford team can prove once and for all that young blood reverses the debilitating effects of Alzheimer’s and other degenerative diseases such as cancer, we’re going to need a whole lot more donors to meet demand around the world. Or, as Wyss-Coray told New Scientist, the hope is that continued research will identify the individual components in the plasma that are contributing to the positive effects - such as GDF11 - and get these synthesised into new types of drugs.

"It would be great if we could identify several factors that we could boost in older people," he said. "Then we might be able to make a drug that does the same thing. We also want to know what organ in the body produces these factors. If we knew that, maybe we could stimulate that tissue in older people."

Abalone blood can fight cold sores and herpes, Australian scientists discover

Australian scientists are developing a powerful new drug to prevent the herpes virus, based on a protein found in the blood of an Australian sea snail.

Abalone are edible, blue-blooded sea snails, and scientists have now found that the protein that makes their blood blue can also block the herpes virus from entering human cells.

The research began by accident, after the warts on a fish processor’s hands started to heal themselves after he’d spent a month working with the Tasmanian blacklip abalone around a decade ago.

After investigating what caused the warts to clear up, scientists from the University of Sydney and Marine Biotechnologies Australia found that a Tasmanian abalone protein known as hemocyanin has potent anti-viral properties.

“Hemocyanins are giant copper-containing glycoproteins and their primary function is to collect and deliver oxygen to desired tissues. Our study shows that abalone hemocyanin inhibits herpes simplex infection,” Fariba Dehghani, a bioengineer from the University of Sydney, explained in a press release.

"We know once infection occurs the virus integrates itself into a body's nerve cells where it lays dormant awaiting reactivation. When awakened it travels back along the nerve tracks to the surface where it takes the form of watery blisters and ulcers on the skin,” she said.

The researchers are now developing a drug based on the protein that will not only manage the symptoms of herpes, as current drugs do, but actually reduce the recurrence of the virus and speed up healing.

If successful, the drug could lead to a whole new class of anti-viral compounds.

Currently more than 70 percent of Australians carry the herpes simplex 1 virus, which causes cold sores, while 13 percent carry herpes simplex 2, which can cause genital herpes. Although there are medications to help shorten the length of flair-ups of the virus, there are currently no known treatments that can kill it.

12-Year-Old Receives First 3D Printed Vertebra Implant

After a soccer injury revealed a malignant tumor on the spinal cord of a 12-year-old boy from China, he required extensive surgery at Peking University Third Hospital (PUTH). Doctors needed to remove second vertebra to prevent the cancer from spreading, and the bone required an implant afterward. The device used was created with a 3D printer, making the boy the first person ever to receive a vertebral implant crafted in this manner.

While there are traditional, pre-fabricated devices that can be implanted into the vertebral column, one made with a 3D printer offers certain advantages. It was designed to precisely match the morphology of his existing bone, which created a much better fit within the second vertebra and between the first and third vertebrae. Not only will this likely expedite healing time, it does not need to be anchored using cements or screws which have the potential to become loose over time.

Unlike traditional 3D printers that extrude plastic, this implant was made out of a titanium powder; titanium is a common material to use in orthopedic implants. It is also covered in small holes in order to allow the bone to grow into it, making the implant a permanent structure that doctors believe is in no danger of coming loose. 

Following the 5-hour-long surgery, the boy was fitted with a halo that will immobilize his head and neck for the next three months as he recovers. Five days after the surgery, he was still unable to speak, though he seemed to be in good spirits and was communicating with a white board. Doctors are confident he will recover well. 

Using 3D printed orthopedic implants appears to be gaining some traction and could revolutionize orthopedic surgery. Though this boy was the first to receive a 3D printed vertebra, doctors at PUTH have used 3D printed implants to replace worn out discs between vertebrae while another patient received an implant that relieved pressure his spine was putting on his nerves. Earlier this year a man from Cardiff received 3D printed implants for his face following a motorcycle accident, and surgeons in the Netherlands used a 3D printer to make a replacement skull for a woman.

OMG!!Two Ebola patients in the US have been cured

An American aid worker and a 50-year-old woman have been cured of their Ebola infections and were discharged from hospital this week.

Kent Brantly, an American aid worker who was infected by the deadly virus when he was living in West Africa, spent nine days in a local hospital before he was flown to the States to receive treatment three weeks ago. He was released from hospital this week and told reporters he was "thrilled to be alive”.

Another cured Ebola patient, Nancy Writebol, was also discharged from hospital this week.

While scientists are rushing to develop a drug that combats or prevents an Ebola infection, there is currently no cure on the market. It is one of the deadliest diseases in the world, and during this outbreak - which has killed 1,300 people in West Africa alone - the fatality rate has been between 50 and 60 percent. If left untreated, the rate skyrockets to around 90 percent.

Brantly and Writebol were patients at the Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. Under the care of Bruce Ribner, the director of Emory's Infectious Disease Unit, they received an experimental treatment known as ZMapp, which was only ever made in small quantities and had never been tested on humans until the recent outbreak. According to the BBC, the hospital isn't actually sure if the drug was the reason for the patients' recovery.

"Asked about the role the experimental drug may have played in their recoveries, Ribner said doctors "do not know whether it helped them, whether it made no difference" or whether it might have delayed their recovery,” Josh Levs and Jacque Wilson reported at CNN.

Both patients had to submit two blood tests in a two-day period and have them return ‘negative’ in order to be released from hospital.

According to CNN, although their blood, sweat and faeces no longer contain the virus - which are the main causes of transmission in humans - the doctors say there is a slight chance that "the virus could linger for up to three months in vaginal fluid and semen”. They say there’s no evidence to suggest that Ebola can be transmitted via these specific bodily fluids, however both patients have been informed of the possible risk.

WATCH: How Long Can You Balance a Pencil?

It sounds like a simple challenge, but we bet your time is terrible. The latest episode of MinutePhysics explains.

Balancing a top-heavy pencil on its tip for an extended period of time is extremely difficult, because it’s almost as if it wants to fall down. Any little nudge will push it off balance, and then gravity will pull its centre of mass even more off balance, and over and over again until it finally falls over. In mathematics, this is described as the inverted pendulum.

If a perfectly balanced pencil with a perfectly sharpened tip was to get knocked off balance by one ten-thousandth of the width of an atom, it would it would take only three seconds for it to fall over. Watch the latest episode of MinutePhysics above to find out why.

Digital textbooks adapt to your level as you learn

While students are learning from these digital textbooks, the textbooks are learning from the students. They can adapt their content to suit the unique learning behaviour of every student. This is what the future of education looks like:

TIRED of learning from a dusty old textbook? Try a book that learns from you. Students in Houston, Texas, are about to get their hands on the first digital schoolbooks that use artificial intelligence to personalise lessons. The aim, says the books' creator, is to "explode the book" and rethink how students learn from texts.

"We want to be able to create the perfect book for every person," says Richard Baraniuk, director of the OpenStax project at Houston's Rice University, which is behind the books. "Ultimately, we want a system that turns reading the book into an exploration of knowledge."

OpenStax already offers an array of online and printed textbooks on subjects including economics, biology and history. For the past three years, researchers have tracked how students in 12 US schools use the books in their studies, including information on how they scored on questions.

That work is now being used to train machine-learning algorithms that give OpenStax's biology and physics textbooks the ability to adapt to individuals. If a reader seems to be struggling with a particular topic – acceleration, say – the book will slot in additional explanations and practice questions, and increase emphasis on related subjects, such as centripetal force, that could otherwise trip that person up.

The adaptive textbooks also incorporate a learning method called retrieval practice, in which material that students have already learned pops up again in occasional quizzes. This method has been shown to enhance students' ability to retain material, and the algorithmic textbooks will be able to decide when to ask questions based on past exercises.

Digital textbooks are not new – but despite their potential, they have yet to be widely adopted.

"Universities are just not suited for developing and serving such large-scale products. We need start-ups for that," says Peter Brusilovsky of the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, one of the designers of the interactive learning system ELM-ART (Episodic Learner Model – The Adaptive Remote Tutor). "If done right, adaptive textbooks could help us to learn faster and better."

Such personalised learning is designed to give students who are struggling time to understand subjects, while faster learners can surge ahead without getting bored. Software is a great way to do this – at Summit Preparatory Charter High School in Redwood City, California, students spend a portion of each week working independently with a computer program that suggests assignments and tracks progress, but students choose how to spend their time and set their own pace. This approach has helped Summit to become one of the top 20 schools in California, according to US News and World Report.

The initial roll-out of OpenStax in Houston high schools will be relatively small, but large institutions have also expressed interest.

Salt Lake Community College, which has more than 60,000 students and is the largest higher-education institution in Utah, wants to pilot OpenStax's algorithm-enhanced textbooks next year in political science, business and mathematics classes. Jason Pickavance, director of educational initiatives at the college, says he is curious to see whether the books improve student performance.

"We have such a varied student body in terms of college readiness," Pickavance says. "What they need is more individualised attention, more tutoring. The courseware has the potential for us to get that mix right."

Whether the books are successful will depend on teachers, says Ben du Boulay, who works on artificial intelligence at the University of Sussex, UK. They are the ones who will ensure that students make the most of their books – for instance, by working out what to do when the books identify a common problem area among their students.

"If all we needed was books, why have teachers?" de Boulay says. "It's the educational interactions around private study that make the difference."

Scientists Propose Using Lasers to Fight Global Warming From Space

At the world's first major geoengineering conference, two separate scientists put forward proposals to use lasers to modify the Earth's climate and fight global warming, from space.

One suggested that a satellite equipped with a high-powered laser could grow clouds in the atmosphere below; the other proposed lasers that would blast greenhouse gases from orbit to effectively erase the agents of climate change. 

The highly theoretical proposals are still in their early stages, and easily count as the more radically ambitious of the already radically ambitious climate engineering schemes discussed by scientists. These plans don't concern gadgets that absorb carbon pollution or spreading particles in the sky, after all—we're talking about space lasers powerful enough to alter the climate.

And European Space Agency fellow Isabelle Dicaire studies them full time. She traveled to Berlin this week to discuss how a satellite equipped with high-powered LIDAR lasers may prove useful for researching—and maybe eventually actually orchestrating—climate engineering.

LIDAR is remote sensing technology that blasts a laser at a target, then analyzes its reflection to accurately measure distances. It's already widely used here on Earth (on things such as Google's driverless car), and by NASA's CALIPSO satellite. Dicaire is interested in what we could do with a much more powerful LIDAR positioned in space; theoretically, it should be able to better detect the movement of particles in clouds, and maybe even make new ones.

THIS WOULD BE THE FIRST STEP IF YOU'D LIKE TO DO LASER CLOUD SEEDING

Among the most widely discussed geoengineering ideas of recent years is so-called cloud-brightening. A cloud is just a mass of water vapor that's condensed into droplets around particles floating in the air—and the more droplets in a cloud, the more sunlight gets bounced off of them. 

So, geoengineers figure that if you can increase the surface area of clouds, or seed more of them altogether, you could begin to reflect back enough sunlight to cool the globe. Research into the subject has been limited, and Dicaire says a powerful LIDAR would help scientists better understand the science. Beyond that, it could be used to carry out the cloud-seeding itself.

"Another application is to use the effects that are happening inside the plasma filaments to do some exotic stuff. For instance, laser-based cloud seeding," she said. Researchers at the University of Geneva, Dicaire says, have demonstrated that lasers can produce droplets.

"They are generating nano-sized water droplets from the laser," she said. They're doing it in a lab, though. "I'm monitoring the field to see what we could do from space."

So, theoretically: "You can use the Earth Observation System to target or find where you have your clouds, what kind of clouds you would like to seed, and then from that, aim the beam towards these clouds." Bear in mind that the idea ESA is examining here is entirely theoretical, and no laser even exists in orbit capable of performing such a feat. But it's not unthinkable, technologically speaking—the political and economic hurdles are probably larger.

"So far you can only find these laser sources on the ground. Eventually, if someone would like to put them in a satellite, they would have to space qualify them. So this is something that some industries are looking into. And this would be the first step if you'd like to do laser cloud seeding."

This would likely be a pretty expensive way to make clouds brighter—older proposals suggest using boats to spray seawater skyward—and you'd need an awful lot of cloud-growing laser satellites. But Dicaire, for now, is more interested in the underlying research LIDAR could help scientists perform.

"It's a very basic concept. The only one looking at it at the moment is ESA, and it's very preliminary. We just want to see if it's possible to send your beam from the satellite to the ground. If it's possible then, yeah, we'll look more closely into this," she said.

Alternatively, we could use another type of laser-toting satellite to blast away the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. That's what Aidan Cowley, a professor at Dublin City University, proposes, anyhow. He believes that a solar-powered satellite equipped with a plasma laser could hone in on heat-trapping gases in order to get them to break apart into less harmful ones.

"We've already observed here on earth that plasma ionization approaches, for example, air plasmas, can essentially dissociate long-lived pollutants: SF6, carbon dioxide. This is something we've observed, and it's been well reported in literature," Cowley told me. "Plasma essentially will excite whatever gas it's traveling through, and just by giving energy to these gases, these molecular species, they'll break up—in the case of SF6, they'll become S, and become more benign greenhouse gases."

It's an alluring idea, of course; SF6 is a potent and long-lasting greenhouse gas. And our immense CO2 output is driving climate change toward a cliff; it'd be convenient if we could just zap them away with a laser. So why haven't we done it already, if plasma ionization has proven to scatter the building blocks of our climate crisis?

"The problem about using [lasers] as a means of actually addressing climate, greenhouse gases per se, is that the energy used to strike those plasmas has to be generated here on Earth. So essentially you're burning fuel to destroy the emissions that you're producing anyway, and it ends up being a net positive to the emissions profile anyway. So you have to come up with a low cost, energy-free scenario that frees you from that paradigm. And that's where the idea of using space solar power to do so comes into it."

A satellite outfitted with high-efficiency solar panels should do the trick.

THERE'S NOTHING CRAZY ABOUT IT, SOLAR POWER IN SPACE

"Essentially by using abundant power that's available in orbit, to drive ionization phenomenon in the atmosphere, you can neatly size up the problem of doing the same thing here on the ground, and you have a nearly unlimited supply of energy to do so. You just need to develop the technology and tap it for that," he said.

Now, there are other pitfalls here; those greenhouse gases are already pretty diffuse in the atmosphere, so it'd be hard to target them effectively with a laser. Cowley says you'd probably need multiple units to do it effectively. Then there's the vast expense of building, testing, and deploying the machines, of course.

Cowley also says his satellite would be useful for creating ozone, to patch up the holes we've left by overusing aerosols. "You could use it to create ozone, too," he said. "Pretty strong pedigree for producing ozone. It's a very easy trick." Then again, he adds, the technology could be used to the reverse effect, too.

"Conversely, from a military perspective, you could also use it to destroy the ozone as well, if you do it the right way," he said. "It could potentially open the holes in the atmosphere of your not too friendly neighbors."

So does Dr. Cowley think his greenhouse gas-blasting satellite is feasible?

"I still think it will take a long time. It's got an underground movement to a certain degree, so I think it will continue to be developed, going forward. Space solar power has got a fairly good future for certain applications, and, I think, eventually, like most technology, it will be the niche that drives the mainstream adaptation," he said. "Find one good niche and make it work, and people will go, 'oh that's not so crazy after all.' And there's nothing crazy about it, solar power in space. It's not science fiction."