Daily Press: Plasma pencil kills germs: "NORFOLK -- Physicist Mounir Laroussi walks quickly through the gray, empty space that greets him when the elevators open to the Frank Reidy Research Center for Bioelectrics on Southampton Avenue.

He enters a hall and unlocks a wooden door to his lab. On a worktable lies a small, plastic wand that you might not have noticed in the midst of tall metal helium tanks, computers and assorted machines.

But the wand is the most interesting thing in the room.

Laroussi calls it the 'plasma pencil.' Plasma is a substance made of energized atomic particles that's created when gas is electrified. It's considered the fourth state of matter besides solids, liquids and gases."