"You can feel the heat on your face," he says. "You can feel yourself being roasted, so you don't want to get too close."

But he spends more time studying volcano flow patterns from the safety of his lab in suburban Maryland, with the help of a little baby powder. It turns out that the white stuff mimics the behavior of potentially lethal forces surprisingly well.

A volcanologist with the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, Andrews is part of the global scientific effort to better understand volcanoes, largely to reduce their destructive impact.

"Huge portions of the world are threatened by volcanoes," he says. Andrews hopes that by modeling eruptions, people will have a better idea of how far away, and