While visiting Hong Kong to speak at a university, world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking told a news conference why mankind must press forward into the final frontier.

"It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species," Dr. Hawking said on Tuesday, according to the Associated Press. "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of."

Hawking — a Star Trek fan who played himself in The Next Generation's "Descent, Part I" — emphasized that we are capable of establishing a permanent base on the Moon within 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40. And within 100 years — if humans can avoid killing themselves — such space settlements can be self-sustaining. He added, however, "We won't find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system."

The 64-year-old author of "A Brief History of Time" received a rock star's welcome on his way to a sold-out lecture at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. In a separate story, Hawking recalled during his talk that the late Pope John Paul II once told a gathering of scientists not to study the beginning of the universe because it was the work of God. Hawking then joked he was glad the Pope wasn't aware he had just presented a paper suggesting how the universe began. "I didn't fancy the thought of being handed over to the Inquisition like Galileo," he quipped in his synthesized voice. (But if that were to happen, maybe they can at least play cards together.)

For more about these stories, visit this link and this link.

More "Cloaking" Theories Announced

It looks like the "cloaking device" is going to be invented one way or another. Last month we reported on a pair of scientists who theorized how to achieve a cloaking effect by using "superlens" material to create a resonance that cancels out the light bouncing off an object (related story). Shortly thereafter two other separate teams published papers proposing slightly different ways to achieve the same effect.

In the journal Science, British professor Sir John Pendry outlines a way to use so-called "metamaterials" to induce a change in the direction of electromagnetic waves, such as light. "If you put a pencil in water that's moving, the water naturally flows around the pencil. When it gets to the other side, the water closes up," Pendry told the BBC. Manipulating the nano-scale structure of the metamaterial can make light behave similarly. "You want to put a coating around the pencil that allows light to flow around it like water, in a nice, curved way."

Pendry and colleagues from the U.S. are testing certain metamaterials and hope to build a simple demonstration model of a cloaking device within 18 months.

Professor Ulf Leonhardt of Scotland, author of another cloaking paper in Science, describes a similar "mirage" premise. "What you're trying to do is guide light around an object, but the art is to bend it such that it leaves the object in precisely the same way that it initially hits it. You have the illusion that there is nothing there," he told a BBC science program.

For the complete story, see this BBC News link.

Safety of Nanotechnology Questioned

If you've ever worried that the Borg Queen might detonate a bioweapon in the Earth's atmosphere filled with nanoprobes that will gradually assimilate humanity ... well, those fears are not too extremely off the mark. Except instead of the Borg Collective, we're talking about corporations using nanotechnology in consumer products without, perhaps, fully understanding the ramifications.

A business story in the Los Angeles Times examines the growing global fears over incorporating artificial particles tens of thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair into such everyday products as golf balls, sunscreen and clothing. One "miraculous" household cleaner was cited as immediately causing severe symptoms in more than a hundred customers in Europe.

"Simply understanding what nanotechnology is can be daunting for most people. The scientists and engineers immersed in it face a greater challenge: calculating the immediate and long-term risks of tinkering with the chemical and biological building blocks of matter to construct particles so small they can pass freely through the walls of individual cells."

While scientists believe that nanotechnology will eventually create revolutionary change in energy, supercomputing, toxic waste disposal and other areas, today it's being used for much more mundane applications such as spill-proof garments, cosmetics that claim to cure cellulite, and stronger tennis rackets.

"Yet alterations in the chemistry of everyday life can have unpredictable consequences," the article states, and nanotech critics are calling for more safety research and regulation. See the full story at this LATimes.com link.

"Zero-Point Energy" Could Power Warp Drives

A video at Space.com describes how a quantum principle called "zero-point field physics" — the idea that massive amounts of latent energy exist in the space between atoms — could someday lead to warp drives or wormhole travel. Describing a theoretical model called the "Casimir Effect," Bob Frisbee of Advanced Technologies at NASA says, "There is, in fact, a real, experimentally observed example of the type of field that we need to generate to make a wormhole or a warp drive." Of course, there are significant engineering hurdles to overcome in order to fly a starship that way, but the hope is, he adds, "that there will be a lot of technology that can be derived from these new theoretical models, just as there were a lot of new technologies that came out of quantum mechanics and relativity." To see more specifically what he's talking about, visit this Space.com page.