"Shields Up!"

"The idea is really like in Star Trek, when Scottie turns on a shield to protect the starship Enterprise from proton beams—it's almost identical really,'' Bob Bingham of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford says. Their study on how to protect astronauts from a dangerous source of space radiation, thus lifting a major doubt clouding the dream to send humans to Mars, was recently published in a journal by Britain's Institute of Physics. It draws on numerical simulation that is also used in nuclear fusion, in which a hot plasma is kept in place by a powerful magnetic field.

Read the full paper here ...