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Making the world's thinnest material in a blender, simulating tsunamis and creating a cloak to render a person entirely invisible sound like ideas straight out of a sci-fi film.

But scientists will today reveal their progress in turning these dreams into a reality.

Europe's top researchers will address an audience of 2,000 at the Ted Conference in Brussels, Belgium, to present the fruits of their 'high-risk, high-gain' labours, which have received millions of euros in funding from the European Research Council.

The event will be live streamed at 13:15 GMT.

One scientist will show how the world's stongest material, graphene (an atomic-scale model is pictured), can be made in a kitchen blender at the TED Conference in Brussels, Belgium today

Last week, scientists announced that they had discovered a new property of graphene – the world's thinnest and strongest material - that could trigger an electric car revolution

But in order to make use of the discovery, experts must first discover how to make industrial quantities of the 'wonder material', which could be used for everything from flexible touchscreens to condoms.

Today, Professor Jonathan Coleman, of Trinity College, Dublin, will reveal how graphene can be made in a kitchen blender.

Together with his team, he has found a way to produce incredibly thin sheets of graphene, a nanometre thick, by using powdered graphite, which is found in pencil lead.

To do this, he mixes the powder at high speed with an 'exfoliating liquid' to produce thin 'monolayer flakes'.

Professor Ulf Leonhardt, of Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, has been working for 15 years on making Harry Potter's invisibility cloak a reality by using optics. A still is shown from the film 

While the team has produced grams of the material so far, Professor Coleman said the method could be scaled up to produce tonnes of perfect graphene sheets.

They are working on using the technique to create 'industrially important' materials too.

Invisibility cloaks will also be discussed at the event.

Professor Ulf Leonhardt, of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, has been working for 15 years on making Harry Potter's invisibility cloak a reality using optics.

He explained: 'I work on connections between optics and quantum optics with ideas from general relativity – on the geometry of light.

'Applications include experimental analogues of the event horizon, invisibility cloaking, and perfect imaging.'

Today, he will explain how he is pushing the laws of optics, which govern how light is bent and pass through lenses, to its limits, in a bid to develop an optical cloaking device.

Invisibility cloaks could one day have obvious applications, such as hiding spies and military vehicles, but the professor told The Independent that his research could also shed light on the mysteries of dark energy, which is a repulsive force that physicists know very little about. 

He said: 'Ideas that may seem outrageous can be pursued. If they are right they should be taken seriously, however peculiar they may seem. The significant thing is what they teach us.' 

Dr Tiziana Rossetto has created a tsunami simulator after seeing the chaos caused by the tsunami that devastated Sri Lanka in 2004. This image shows a woman walking through the remains of her home

While Professor Leonhardt will explain how his work could unravel mysteries of the universe, Dr Tiziana Rossetto, an expert in earthquake engineering at University College London, will detail how she is working to save lives on Earth.

She set about creating a tsunami simulator after seeing the chaos caused by the tsunami that devastated Sri Lanka in 2004.

Many experts doubted it could be done because there is a shortage of data about rare tsunamis and the waves are so long they are incredibly difficult to model.

But she persevered to develop a lab-based model that will be used to change how buildings can be designed to survive tsunamis.

Her generator at the Wallingford hydraulic research station in Oxfordshire is 230 ft (70 metres) long and 13 ft (four metres wide) and produces long wavelengths linked to tsunamis.

It contains a plethora of instruments to enable scientists to examine the way tsunami waves hit coastal defence structures and buildings, mirroring what happens in real life.

Ocean scientist Dr Laura Robinson is studying the ocean and its deep sea corals to predict how it may change in the future in the face of global warming. Stock image of a coral reef shown

She said the tool 'allows us to contribute to a revolution in how we design buildings. It combines engineering with seismology, structural dynamics and even the social sciences.'

Her aim is to 'save lives, and in doing so build a safer world for our children'.

Ocean scientist Dr Laura Robinson of the University of Bristol, is studying the ocean and its deep sea corals to predict how it may change in the future in the face of global warming and will also explain her research at the event this afternoon.

Her team has examined coral skeletons and sediments to analyse abrupt climate changes in the Atlantic over the past 30,000 years, collecting data to show how deep-sea ecosystems are affected by changes in the ocean such as the concentration of carbon dioxide and water circulation.

'It is only through looking at the history of the earth's climate that we can predict what might happen in the future,' she said.

She hopes to discover the conditions required for cold-water deep-sea corals to survive in the central Atlantic in order to work out a way to protect species that are vulnerable to changes in ocean chemistry, using cutting-edge geochemical techniques.