Tiny. Cheap. No moving parts. Aerosol cans and UAVs may never be the same.

It sounds implausible, if not impossible: a pump the size of an Altoid that can replace the pressure tanks, seals, valves, fittings, exposed wicks, airflow pathways, and other complex mechanical parts of every small combustion device. Think camp stoves, lanterns - any portable fuel-burning equipment used for cooking, lighting, or heating. And the potential of this remarkable invention, called a capillary pump, goes far beyond redesigned camping gear to small generators, fuel cells, even unmanned aerial vehicles.

Vapore, the company behind the pump, has already sold more than a dozen $5,000 evaluation kits to several national labs, military contractors, and manufacturers. "The other day, I got a call from a Fortune 500 company that sells air fresheners and insecticides," says Vapore CEO Rob Lerner. "They're considering the pump as a way to eliminate disposable aerosol cans."

Photovoltaic cells allow people to stay connected wherever they are.
Bags with their own solar panels will allow people to recharge mobile phones on the run, a conference on sustainable technology has heard.

Mobile phone covers, laptop cases and bags with photovoltaic cells will be available later this year, according to Len McKelvey, director of their Australian supplier, Air Water Australia.

The technology, which has been used by the Israeli military, was on show at last week's Enviro 04 conference.

Seismologists may soon have the ability to predict earthquakes several months in advance, say a team of researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles.

The group announced Tuesday that it had used a newly developed technique to closely forecast major earthquakes in California and Japan last year, including the magnitude 6.5 tremor that struck Paso Robles, California, in December, and the magnitude 8.3 quake near Hokkaido, Japan, in September.

The team has submitted a paper outlining the technique to Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors, an international geophysics journal.

Get used to SARS, West Nile, Hantavirus, Ebola, Nipah, Hendra, AIDS and other new nasty infectious diseases. Health experts say we're living in a new age of infections.

And we have mostly ourselves to blame.

The nation's top scientists say that environmental, economic, social and scientific changes have helped to trigger an unprecedented explosion of more than 35 new infectious diseases that have burst upon the world in the past 30 years. The U.S. death rate from infectious disease, which dropped in the first part of the 20th century and then stabilized, is now double what it was in 1980.

MIT Project Seeks to Outfit Fighter With Nanotechnology

Imagine a futuristic battleground where soldier uniforms as light as paper resist bullets, treat wounds, and detect chemical and biological poisons, where soft fabrics morph into splints, and battle suit sensors relay details about a soldier's location and physical condition to headquarters.

Such is the science fiction scenario envisioned for the real 21st century world by researchers and scientists at the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, one of the nation's newest Army-sponsored research centers and the largest military defense project undertaken here at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The world's first lightweight radiation-proof fabric has been developed by a US company.

Called Demron, its potential applications range from lightweight full-body suits - which would allow the wearer to move unencumbered in high-radiation areas - to protective tents and radiation-proof linings for aircraft and spacecraft.

Traditional shielding relies on the presence of heavy metals, such as lead. But Demron is based on a polymer that mimics some of the electronic properties of these heavy metals, says John Hefler of Radiation Shield Technologies, the company in Miami, Florida, that is developing the material.