I spent 3 weeks in the Himalayas last year, with a Power Monkey solar panel strapped to the back of my pack. I figured the odds of a decent charge were good - we were in direct sun for ~8hrs a day, and the UV at >5000m altitude is seriously intense.

In practise, I usually managed to get enough charge at the end of the day to power up my HTC Desire for about 20mins, with wi-fi turned off and making no calls - essentially using it as a notepad and sending the odd "we're OK!" text to my family. So, not a viable option for anything more than one emergency call, really.

BUT - having said that, up there, there really isn't any other option. Generators at lodges are becoming more common, but it'll cost you 250 rupees for half an hour charge (that's about 2GBP/3USD) in a country where over 30 per cent of Nepalese live below the poverty line of US$12 per person/per month.

When there's no electricity, no landlines, and no way between villages other than long, steep, gruelling high-altitude hikes, and the nearest medical assistance is often over a days hike away, that one emergency mobile phone call can become pretty damn important for the locals. So irrespective of whether it's a desirable lifestyle choice for the first world, THAT's why this research is worth pursuing.

I'm not a "real" physicist - but I did study this at undergrad level, so here goes:

Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle ) states that there must always be a minimum uncertainty in certain pairs of related variables - e.g. position and momentum, i.e. the more accurately you know the position of something, the less accurately you know how it's moving. Another related pair is energy and time - the more accurately you know the energy of something, the less accurately you know when the measurement was taken.

(disclaimer - this makes perfect sense when expressed mathematically, it onlysounds like handwavery when you translate it into English, as words are ambiguous and mean different things to different people)

Anyway, this uncertainty means that there is a small but non-zero probability of a higher-energy event occuring in the history of a lower-energy particle (often mis-stated as "particles can borrow energy for a short time, but check the wiki page for a more accurate statement). It sounds nuts, I know, but it has many real-world implications that have no explanation in non-quantum physics. Particles can "tunnel" through barriers that they shouldn't be able to cross, for instance - this is how semi-conductors work.

By implication, there is a small probability of the neutrino acting as if it had a higher energy, and *this* is how neutrino-flipping occurs without violating conservation of energy.

I think in the case of libel, the assumption is innocence on the part of the one whose reputation is being challenged, rather than assuming that an accusation levelled at them is true until proven false.

At the end of my Physics degree, I had the option of continuing in Physics academia, or going into the world of work. I'm sad to say that the main reason I wanted to leave Physics, despite somehow managing to retain a small fragment of my initial enthusiasm for the subject, was looking round at the professional physicists who took my course, and realising I really didn't want to spend the rest of my productive life surrounded by these people.