WASHINGTON | Wed Mar 13, 2013 1:15am EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A defense contractor better known for building jet fighters and lethal missiles says it has found a way to slash the amount of energy needed to remove salt from seawater, potentially making it vastly cheaper to produce clean water at a time when scarcity has become a global security issue.

The process, officials and engineers at Lockheed Martin Corp say, would enable filter manufacturers to produce thin carbon membranes with regular holes about a nanometer in size that are large enough to allow water to pass through but small enough to block the molecules of salt in seawater. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.

Because the sheets of pure carbon known as graphene are so thin - just one atom in thickness - it takes much less energy to push the seawater through the filter with the force required to separate the salt from the water, they said.

The development could spare underdeveloped countries from having to build exotic, expensive pumping stations needed in plants that use a desalination process called reverse osmosis.

"It's 500 times thinner than the best filter on the market today and a thousand times stronger," said John Stetson, the engineer who has been working on the idea. "The energy that's required and the pressure that's required to filter salt is approximately 100 times less."

Access to clean drinking water is increasingly seen as a major global security issue. Competition for water is likely to lead to instability and potential state failure in countries important to the United States, according to a U.S. intelligence community report last year.

"Between now and 2040, fresh water availability will not keep up with demand absent more effective management of water resources," the report said. "Water problems will hinder the ability of key countries to produce food and generate electricity."

About 780 million people around the world do not have access to clean drinking water, the United Nations reported last year.

"One of the areas that we're very concerned about in terms of global security is the access to clean and affordable drinking water," said Tom Notaro, Lockheed business manager for advanced materials. "As more and more countries become more developed ... access to that water for their daily lives is becoming more and more critical."

PRODUCTION CHALLENGE

Lockheed still faces a number of challenges in moving to production of filters made of graphene, a substance similar to the lead in pencils. Working with the thin material without tearing it is difficult, as is ramping up production to the size and scale needed. Engineers are still refining the process for making the holes.

It is not known whether Lockheed faces commercial competition in this area. But it is not the only one working on the technology.

Jeffrey Grossman, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has done research on graphene membranes for filtration, said he was not familiar with details of Lockheed's work. But he said finding a way to produce graphene sheets with nanometer-sized holes could produce a major advancement in desalination efficiency.

"If you can design a membrane that's completely different than what we use today, then there's a chance for more than two orders of magnitude (100 times) increase in the permeability of the membrane," Grossman said.

Stetson, who began working on the issue in 2007, said if the new filter material, known as Perforene, was compared to the thickness of a piece of paper, the nearest comparable filter for extracting salt from seawater would be the thickness of three reams of paper - more than half a foot thick.

"It looks like chicken wire under a microscope, if you could get an electron microscope picture of it," he said. "It's all little carbon atoms tied together in a diaphanous, smooth film that's beautiful and continuous. But it's one atom thick and it's a thousand time stronger than steel."

Thickness is one of the main factors that determines how much energy has to be used to force saltwater through a filter in the reverse osmosis process used for desalination today.

"The amount of work it takes to squeeze that water through the torturous path of today's best membranes is gone for Perforene," Stetson said. "It just literally pops right through because the membrane is thinner than the atoms it's filtering."

Notaro said Lockheed expects to have a prototype by the end of the year for a filter that could be used as a drop-in replacement for filters now used in reverse osmosis plants.

The company is looking for partners in the filter manufacturing arena to help it commercialize Perforene as a filter in the 2014-2015 time frame, he said.

Lockheed officials see other applications for Perforene as well, from dialysis in healthcare to cleaning chemicals from the water used in hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," of oil and gas wells.

(Editing by Warren Strobel and Jackie Frank)

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Mon Jan 7, 2013 5:06pm EST

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA's Kepler space telescope has uncovered another 461 potential new planets, most of which are the size of Earth or a few times larger, scientists said on Monday.

The announcement brings Kepler's head count to 2,740 candidate new worlds, 105 of which have been confirmed.

"Two years ago we had around 1,200 candidate planet objects. A year later, we added a significant number of new objects and saw the trend of huge numbers of very small planets ... twice the size of Earth and smaller," Kepler astronomer Christopher Burke told a news conference webcast from the American Astronomical Society conference in Long Beach, California.

With the addition of 461 new candidate planets, collected over 22 months of Kepler telescope observations, the proliferation of smaller planets continues.

The new targets include what appears to be a planet about 1.5 times bigger than Earth circling its sun-like parent star in a 242-day orbit - a distance where liquid water, believed to be necessary for life, could exist on its surface.

In related research, astronomers have determined that about one in six sun-like stars have Earth-sized planets circling their parent stars closer than Mercury's 88-day day orbit around the sun.

The goal of the Kepler mission, which began in 2009, is to determine how many stars in the Milky Way galaxy have an Earth-sized planet orbiting in so-called habitable zones, where water can exist on its surface.

"You need very specific conditions to have liquid water. You can't have your planet too close to your star where it's too hot. You can't have it too far away for the planet conditions to be too cold. We're trying to find these planets in this very specific habitable zone," said Burke, who is with the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.

The Kepler telescope works by tracking slight decreases in the amount of light coming from 160,000 target stars caused by a planet or planets passing by, or transiting, relative to the telescope's point of view.

Earth-sized planets located about where Earth orbits the sun would take 365 days to circle their parent star. Those located closer, in Mercury-like 88-day orbits, transit more frequently.

Scientists need at least two and preferably three or more cycles to determine whether an apparent transit is real or some other phenomena.

"In order to catch several transits of an Earth analog, you have to wait for one more year to get another transit. It's simply too early to call," said astronomer Francois Fressin, with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The Kepler roster also boosts the number of multi-planet systems. Of the 2,740 objects, 299 are in dual-planet systems, 112 are in triplets, 44 are part of four-planet systems, 11 systems have five planets and one system has six planets.

(Editing by Jane Sutton and Christopher Wilson)

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Christopher Marinello, executive director at the Art Loss Register in London, holds Henri Matisse's painting ''Le Jardin'' in this handout photo.

STOCKHOLM | Mon Jan 7, 2013 12:47pm EST

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - A British art sleuth has recovered a painting by French artist Matisse that was stolen from a Stockholm museum 25 years ago.

Matisse's "Le Jardin", valued at about 6 million crowns ($916,200), was recovered by Christopher Marinello, an art recovery specialist at the Art Loss Register in London.

"It is fantastic that the painting has turned up again," said Kristin Ek, spokeswoman for the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. "It was stolen so long ago that really we had almost given up hope."

The painting was stolen in May, 1987 when a thief smashed his way into the museum with a sledgehammer during the night.

The theft was reported to both Interpol and the Art Loss Register (ALR), the world's largest international private database of stolen, missing and looted artwork.

The painting was recovered after an art dealer in Britain checked with the ALR's register before selling the Matisse.

"We are happy the painting seems to be okay and in good condition," Moderna Museet's Ek said. "It was a good start to the New Year."

Marinello would not give details of how he got hold of the Matisse.

"No arms were broken and no payments were made," he said, adding the painting would be returned to the museum through Sweden's ministry of culture.

The Moderna Museet is still missing a painting by Georges Braque, after a theft in 1993.

Stolen art is a lucrative industry with $6-7 billion worth of thefts every year, and the current global economic downturn has led to a surge in crimes, according to Marinello.

Last year, for example, thieves made off with paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Monet and other prominent modern artists from Rotterdam's Kunsthal museum worth tens of millions of dollars.

If thieves cannot collect a ransom from insurers or owners, the art is sold on the black market, often for a fraction of its real worth, or even exchanged for drugs or guns.

Of the 360,000 objects on the ALR's database, Marinello said there were several he particularly wanted to find.

The first is a hoard including paintings by Vermeer, Degas and Rembrandt worth $300 million stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990.

There is a $5 million reward for the paintings.

"Then there is a Rafael stolen by the Nazis in WWII that is pretty nice," he said.

Marinello, however, will have his work cut out. By his admission, only 5-10 percent of stolen art is ever recovered.

($1 = 6.5490 Swedish crowns)

(Reporting by Simon Johnson and Mike Collett-White)

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