As expected from a New Scientist article, this is not very informative. If you wanna learn more, you might wanna take a look at these:

http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/archive/ci/31/i06/html/06chem....

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.08/helium.html

http://books.google.com/books?id=A-lS1ZD8yOkC