San Francisco Chronicle: One afternoon last fall, Armand Neukermans, a tall engineer with a sweep of silver bangs, flipped on a noisy pump in the back corner of a Sunnyvale lab. Within moments, a fine mist emerged from a tiny nozzle, a haze of salt water under high pressure and heat.
It didn't look like much. But this seemingly simple vapor carries a lot of hope - and inspires a lot of fear. If Neukermans' team of researchers can fine-tune the mechanism to spray just the right size and quantity of salt particles into...