Chances are you've never seen a laboratory like the one supervised by Chip Maxwell. Pulsating Day-Glo fluorescent lights flash off brushed aluminium walls as Maxwell places his hands on an opaque plastic hemisphere sprouting from the countertop. Maxwell, an environmental engineer at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, rubs it with his eyes closed. "What does that instrument do?" asks a woman from Kentucky, raising her camera to capture the scientist at work.