NASA is nervous about sending astronauts to Mars because exposure to the wind of high-energy particles streaming from the sun could indeed prove deadly. But a team of researchers at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) near Oxford, UK, have shown that a magnet no wider than your thumb can deflect a stream of charged particles like those in the solar wind. It gives new life to an old idea about shielding spacecraft, and might just usher in a new era of space travel.

An electric "force field" for armoured vehicles that vaporises anti-tank grenades and shells on impact has been developed by scientists at the British Ministry of Defence.

Space-borne protective energy systems, like the deflector shields on the fictional starship U.S.S. Voyager, are on the drawing board of real-world scientists. These \"cold plasmas\" -- analogs to the sophisticated defensive grids envisioned by Star Trek\'s creators -- are ambient-temperature, ionized gases related to those found deep within the sun?s core. Such plasmas are capable of shielding satellites and other spacecraft; or making them invisible to radars; or both. Nor will they fry electronics or melt metal.