Mr. Badger, this seems to relate to the other article you posted a month ago.
Hybrid copper-gold nanoparticles convert CO2 (To Hydrocarbons!)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2870725/posts
I find the site that both articles link to rather interesting. There was a show on PBS about 16 years ago about the speed of technological change. One of the statements made in the show was that if you were to take a man of “today” and project him 25 years in the future, they would think the world of that future worked on magic.
Time has proven that to be absolutely true. We have ten years to go, yet look what we have done since then. In 1996, few people had heard of the internet. Few people had cell phones and even home computers were essentially used for Microsoft works or lame games. And GPS for the masses, and smart phones, and on and on. A lot has changed. A lot more (exponentially speaking) will in the next ten years.
The PC that was on the desk was an IBM XT 286 and was used primarily for writing business letters and accessing the mainframe:
We had a Coleco Adam computer at home that was primarily a game machine:
CD still stood for 'Certificate of Deposit' and VHS was battling Beta for dominance in the market.
Both the Challenger and Chernobyl blew up and Michael Jackson was still black................
All those inventions were initially funded for military purposes. If we continue to cut military spending to fund welfare spending as Barky is doing then leaps in technology will slow to a snail striddle. The reason America leads in technology is because we fund a big military. The wealth of a nation is correlated with how much military investment was made 30 to 40 years ago.