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- THE WALLS HAVE EARS DEPARTMENT -

Surveillance Society

Since 9/11, the FBI, once organized to fight crime, has been undergoing a makeover to focus its efforts on preventing future terrorist attacks. To help the agency in its efforts, in 2001, the Congress recklessly passed and is now about to renew the USA PATRIOT Act, which dramatically increased the surveillance powers of law enforcement. Yet, the truth is that terrorism (even including the 9/11 attacks) is a rare phenomenon in North America that kills far fewer people than ordinary crime, car accidents, or medical problems. As tragic as the 3,000 deaths from the aberrant 9/11 strikes were, the worst effect of those incidents was the self-inflicted wound from the conversion of America from the ???land of the free??? to the ???land of the watched.???

The PATRIOT Act gives the FBI the power to collect information on people who are not suspected of committing a crime. For example, the FBI can issue a ???national security letter??? to obtain a person??™s financial, library, telephone, Internet, and e-mail records, as well as an individual??™s customer and employment history with businesses, by merely certifying that the information is ???sought for??? or ???relevant to??? an investigation ???to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.??? Thus, the FBI can nose into the affairs of anyone who comes into contact with a suspected terrorist and will now retain, in its database even after the investigation is closed, the information gathered on innocent people. Visions spring to mind of FBI agents poring over computer-generated lists of anyone who has ever attended a Cat Stevens concert.

Even worse, such national security letters can be issued by FBI supervisors in the field and need no approval by a prosecutor, grand jury, or judge. National security letters would appear to run directly afoul of the U.S. Constitution??™s Fourth Amendment, which states that ???no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause [that the person has committed a crime], supported by Oath or affirmation??¦??? In guaranteeing this vital civil liberty in the Bill of Rights, the founders made no exception even for alleged ???national security??? considerations. Furthermore, those businesses or libraries served by the letters cannot tell the targets of the searches about them, which some courts have ruled violates the First Amendment rights of free speech. The FBI has also stiff-armed congressional inquiries into how the secret letters are being used. Finally, according the Washington Post, the FBI has yet to offer any example of a terrorist plot being disrupted by a national security letter.

The national security letter, however, is only one of the many provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act that broaden government surveillance powers while having little demonstrable effect on preventing terrorism. At the same time, these provisions erode, by diminishing judicial or congressional oversight, the checks and balances of the Constitution. And this is not the first time that expanded law enforcement powers have proved ineffectual. In 1996, the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act severely restricted civil liberties in the United States but did not prevent the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center five years later. Why the American people repeatedly reward failure by tolerating increases in the authority and budgets of government security agencies is a mystery.

In addition to the pernicious direct effects of all this amplified government surveillance on the American public, the indirect effects may be far worse. In an age of big government, the business and non-profit sectors tend to take their cues as to what is acceptable from the government. Increased government surveillance creates a general societal norm for increased surveillance in the workplace. For example, until Congress made their use by businesses illegal, private employers were following the lead of government security agencies by administering demonstrably unreliable polygraph tests to their employees.

Even now, some businesses, which at least rhetorically advocate economic liberty, and some non-profit organizations that propound individual liberty regularly monitor their employees??™ e-mail correspondence and open their mail. One can argue that there is a legal difference between the government and private entities engaging in such Orwellian practices, but the private sector is undeniably reacting, whether consciously or subconsciously, to social norms heavily influenced by government action. One would hope that the private and non-profit sectors would be more enlightened than the government. After all, such oppressive surveillance of ordinary employees??”where no evidence of wrong-doing exists??”causes anger and morale problems among employees, drives some talented workers to ???vote with their feet??? to less intrusive employers, and wastes valuable executive time and resources on the unnecessary control of employees.

Communism in Eastern Bloc nations failed because so many societal resources were wasted on control, leaving few available for individual initiative and creativity. Liberty and privacy make people happy, creative, productive, and rich. The U.S. government??”and the businesses and non-profit groups that are following the ???control-oriented??? social norms fostered by government action??”should take heed and let freedom ring.

Source: The Independent Institute
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1614

- HUNTING FOR THE UNKNOWN DEPARTMENT -

In Chi 71757/100323_kanaslakemonster.jpg "http://uforeview.tripod.com/cjimages/kanaslakemonster.jpg" style="width: 250px; height: 165px;" align="right" hspace="30" vspace="30">

LAKE KANASI, China - The moon is barely a crescent in the sky as dusk darkens the milky green surface of Lake Kanasi.

Four people huddle on the edge of a floating wooden dock, eyes scanning this mountain lake near China's remote northwestern frontier with Central Asia. Small waves lap at their shoes.

In a soft voice, Yuan Guoying recounts his two sightings of the creatures. The first over there, from a cliff, Yuan says. Then again, 19 years later.

From the group comes a squeal as tiny, silver fish dart at hunks of bread they have dropped in.

"Look! There are so many of them!" says one girl. "But where's the lake monster?"

Another 40 minutes pass. A chill breeze kicks up.

Yuan is unfazed.

"We can wait all night," he says. "Let's see if this is our fate."

They have come by the tens of thousands over the years - skeptical scientists, curious tourists - answering the lure of the mysterious "Kanasi Huguai," China's very own version of the Loch Ness monster.

On this particular trip, part class reunion, part tour package, there are a handful of Yuan's university buddies and their wives (mostly retired professors from Beijing with graying hair and quiet humor), three teachers, a nurse, a local reporter, a university student, a lab technician and her mother. They have flown thousands of miles to Xinjiang Province and been driven 15 hours to get to the lake and commemorate the 20th anniversary of Yuan's first sighting of the monsters.

The outing shows how far 40 years of economic reform have taken China and how much more time and money people have to explore interests that were squelched as superstition, an offense to communist dogma.

In today's society, myth-making and chasing are a big business, and the supernatural and the paranormal are no longer taboo.

Reports of a Chinese "Bigfoot" have been picked up by the official Xinhua News Agency, while tourists have searched for the "Xiao Yeren," small wild men. UFO sightings are treated with great seriousness. A conference on the topic was held in September, and UFO buffs claim support from eminent scientists and liaisons with the country's secretive military.

Yuan, a researcher at the Xinjiang Institute of Environmental Protection, hands out Monster T-shirts, and on the bus the passengers watch state television's elaborate, three-part documentary on the myth of the beasts that supposedly have dragged sheep and cows from the shore and devoured them.

It opens with a dramatized scene of a man stopping his horse-drawn cart by the lake on a foggy night. With a loud splash, something emerges from the water and the camera darkens ...

Yuan's photos of the creatures flash across the screen. One, taken from a distance, features several blurry forms clustered close to shore, some looking as long as nearby fir trees. Grainy footage filmed in June by a tourist from Beijing shows frenzied bubbling in the water.

Yuan, a cheerful 66-year-old with an unlined face and penetrating voice, is featured in several interviews, along with other scientists and people who have witnessed the creatures. Some describe enormous shapes and shadows as big as trees and boats, sometimes tinged with red or white. In 2003, when an earthquake struck the area, witnesses in a boat reported seeing a silhouette as long as 70 feet leap out of the water.

"I said it was rubbish at first," says Yuan. "The next day, I saw them."

"It's fish. Giant fish, some about 15 meters (50 feet) long."

In 1980, Yuan was part of a team of 150 experts who launched the first scientific study of the lake's environment and its flora and fauna.

It was then that he met Chinese Mongolians living in the area known as the Tuwa people and heard the ancient legend of the monsters in Kanasi. Few details were available; most of the villagers fell silent when pressed.

Five years later, still intrigued, Yuan headed another team to study environmental protection for the lake - and to search for the creatures of the Tuwa myth.

Within a day, he had his first sighting.

"They looked like tadpoles coming up for breath," Yuan recalls. "Their eyes were huge. Their mouths were gaping."

After weeks of study, Yuan and his team discovered dozens of huge red fish, each 30-50 feet long and weighing more than four tons, living in the lake.

In 1989, scientists concluded that the fish - a type of giant, freshwater salmon that thrives in frigid, deep, waters - were in all likelihood the monsters.

Despite that conviction, there remains a niggling doubt.

Yuan says the largest Taimen salmon scientists have captured is just 12 feet long and weighs 220 pounds. The biggest caught in Kanasi is 4 feet, 9 inches long, according to the documentary - a flat-headed specimen with a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth.

So are the lake monsters really the giant salmon? Or something completely different?

"There is no doubt the so-called lake monster is a kind of fish, the Taimen salmon," says Jiang Zuofa, a professor at the Heilongjiang Aquatic Research Institute in northeastern China. He says he has seen up to 50 of them - some more than 12 feet long - from the top of a mountain.

"The species is big and ferocious and lives in cold, fresh water," he says in a telephone interview. "We believe it is possible for them to eat chickens, geese and sheep, but it is impossible for them to eat cattle."

The People's Daily, the sober mouthpiece of China's ruling Communist Party, weighed in recently.

"Scientists say with certainty that there simply can't be so-called 'lake monsters' in the world," its Web site said.

Lake Kanasi is 200,000 years old, roughly 15 miles by a mile, and more than 4,000 feet up in the Kanasi nature reserve in Xinjiang's northernmost tip, where China, Mongolia, Russia and Kazakhstan converge in snowcapped mountains. It is 603 feet deep at its lowest.

Throughout summer, up to 4,000 tourists a day flock here. All day long, boats chug along the lake, packed with "huguai" spotters.

"Everyone in the country has heard of it," a visitor surnamed Zhou says. "It may be a rich fairy tale but the scenery is so beautiful - plus there's this mysterious creature. How can we not come?"

Surprisingly, there is scant monster publicity at the site. A souvenir shop had but one book about the lake which mentioned the huguai. On the back of a bus ticket a challenge is delicately posed: "The elusive lake monsters await your pursuit."

"We believe there are unidentified creatures in the lake, but we can't say for sure what they are," says Zhao Yuxia, a spokeswoman for the reserve. "We've never seen them with our own eyes."

Even so, there are measures in place to protect the area's wildlife - whatever they may be. Fishing and swimming are banned. Boats are under a strict speed limit.

As Yuan and his group stroll along the shores, he relives his second sighting, just last year.

"It seemed like they were trying to get some sun. Their whole bodies came up to the surface. Their shadows were like one huge roll of plastic - long and black. They shimmered. I couldn't tell at all that they were fish."

No monsters present themselves to Yuan's group during their nighttime visit to the lake.

But still, Qu Yuan, a 26-year-old nurse, is thrilled.

"I kept my eyes on the water," she says, beaming. "The waves were lapping at our feet. It was almost like we were one with the lake."

She adds: "I couldn't see anything but I could feel there was life out there. It was a wonderful feeling."

But Yuan wants more.

He has written two books and numerous essays on the mystery. He says he is asked to speak on it regularly by different schools and organizations, and gets calls, letters and photos from people who think they may have seen the huguai.

What's the next step then in his quest to find the truth?

To catch a fish and study it, Yuan says. But it's not easy on a lake this big.

On the last day of their visit, Yuan's group treks up to the "Fish Viewing Pavilion," perched high on a mountain overlooking the lake. Thousands of tourists are snapping photos.

Breathless and hopeful, Yuan stands on a nearby bluff, hands shielding his eyes from the sun as he looks down onto the water, hoping for a glimpse of the monsters to honor the 20th anniversary of his first sighting.

"It's hard, it's hard," he mutters to himself as he starts a video camera rolling. "They can be anywhere."

After an hour or so of moving from point to point, a downcast Yuan gives up.

As he begins his descent, he takes one last look at the vista.

"All right," he says. "We're done here."

Source: Redorbit
http://www.redorbit.com/news/oddities/296328/in%5Fchina%5Fhunt%5Fon%5Ffor%5Floch%5Fness%
5Fmonster/index.html%3Fsource=r%5Foddities

- UP WHERE THE AIR IS CLEAR DEPARTMENT -

Patent Granted for Antig 71757/100327_antigravity-art.jpg ="http://uforeview.tripod.com/cjimages/antigravity-art.jpg" style="width: 250px; height: 188px;" align="right" hspace="30" vspace="30">
The United States Patent and Trademark Office has given the nod to a patent design for an antigravity device, or a space vehicle, according to a report this week in Nature magazine.

That the office approved the patent application breaks its own resolution to reject inventions that defy the laws of physics, according to the report. Still, the patent, which was granted on Nov. 1 to Boris Volfson of Huntington, Indiana, describes a vehicle propelled by a superconducting shield. The shield can change the curvature of space-time outside the craft in a way that counteracts gravity.

Watchdogs called the science bogus, however. "This is not the first such patent to be granted, but it shows that patent examiners are being duped by false science," Robert Park of the American Physical Society in Washington DC said in the report.

At a first glance, this would seem to be based on the Biefeld-Brown effect, which was discovered by Nikola Tesla at the turn of the 20th century and rediscovered in the 1930s by scientist T. Townsend Brown. The effect has been confirmed many times over and over again.

The Biefeld-Brown effect is real and there are many patents for Biefeld-Brown engines, most of which have been built and they worked. The effect itself is not in dispute. The problem is that it requires large amounts of electricity. If you supply the energy from outside, eg. via electrical cable, then the device can only move as far as your cable is long. Not very useful. If you want to put the electricity generator on the device itself, it becomes too heavy to lift off.

You can build a simple Biefeld-Brown engine at home and test this for yourself. They can be made from a wireframe attached by a cable to a 20.000 Volts DC source and it will shoot up to the ceiling of the room when voltage is applied.

Source: CNET
http://news.com.com/2061-11204_3-5942862.html

EARTH MYSTERIES AND UFO/ET CONGRESS
NOV 12 - 13, 2005

The Days Inn Route 206 & NJTP Exit #7 North, Bordentown, NJ
By Pat J. Marcattilio - Dr. UFO

SPEAKERS INCLUDE: George J. Haas, Hans Holzer PhD, Cmdr. Graham Bethune, Dr. Ruben T. Ong, Rob Simone, Rich Smith, Phil Reynolds, Donald R. Morse, DDS, Jefferey C. Hogue.

For more info, phone Pat Marcattilio at: 609-631-8955
or visit his website at: www.drufo.org

- MONSTERS OF THE ID DEPARTMENT -

El Cucuy Has Roots Deep in Border Folklore

Its name is whispered in hushed tones. For mothers, it is the ultimate threat that keeps their sons and daughters in line. For children, it is the bogeyman, the closet monster and their worst nightmares rolled into one hideous being.

It is el cucuy.

Walk down any market in Brownsville or Matamoros and you can hear mothers invoke its name.

???Portate bien o te lleva el cucuy,??? they say. ???Behave, or the cucuy will get you.???

With today??™s children obsessed with video games, movies and other features of modern life, why do they still fear the shadows at night? Why does this age-old monster still haunt them?

Cultural Creature

The beast is known by different names to different people throughout Latin America. It has been called cucuy, coco, cocu, chamuco and a dozen other titles.

Anthropology professor Tony Zavaleta explained that the ???shadow figure??? is a common myth passed between parent and child. Fathers traditionally tell children that there??™s nothing under the bed or in the closet, while mothers tell the child to fear cucuy.

???One of my earliest recollections, being a little kid ... is hearing the ladies raising kids always say ???oo-ee,??™??? Zavaleta said. ???That sound would alert the child of danger; it would alert them to the dark side. There was something out there that could get you.???

Pre-industrial societies create a conceptual fear creature to keep children away from dangerous places, a theme seen in M. Night Shyamalan??™s 2004 blockbuster film ???The Village.??? These legends often continue as civilization develops, and new names are assigned to it.

???The cucuy is ours,??? Zavaleta explained.

Social sciences professor Manuel Medrano said popular legend describes cucuy as a small humanoid with glowing red eyes that hides in closets or under the bed.

???Some lore has him as a kid who was the victim of violence ... and now he??™s alive, but he??™s not,??? Medrano said, citing Xavier Garza??™s 2004 book ???Creepy Creatures and other Cucuys.???

???He??™s childlike with red eyes, and somewhere between life and death.???

The legend came from Latin America but has remained a strong part of border folklore.

???These creatures develop a permanence by word of mouth, from generation to generation, usually from the grandmother to the grandchild,??? Medrano said. ???It??™s got an appeal not only because it is mysterious, but also because it is a good way of maintaining a child??™s discipline.???

This bogeyman takes different forms depending on the family.

???You take a traditional (legend) like La Llorona, and you are going to get different versions,??? Medrano said, referring to the popular ghost story. ???Some people say she has blond hair and a skeleton face. Other people say she has black hair and a horse face.???

Zavaleta said descriptions change from family to family, but bogeyman legends are common worldwide.

???In every culture, there is that mythological monster,??? Zavaleta said. ???In modern times, it could be the chupacabra. It??™s always a feeling that there is something just waiting to get you.???

Mysterious Monster

As more myths fall to the clarity of science, many people are trying to find the truth to monsters that hide in the night.

???They told me not to go out at night because cucuy would get me,??? said Bob Melendez, paranormal investigator in Brownsville. ???I was afraid to look under my bed.???

Although he dismissed such stories as he grew older, Melendez has come to view the tales in new light after interviewing people who have seen things they could not explain.

???Now, I think, maybe the old folks knew something more.???

The chupacabra is not a recent phenomenon according to Lynn David Livsey, president of the Brownsville Enlightenment Society, a group dedicated to understanding the unknown.

???Most civilizations have an oral history,??? Livsey said. ???Since it was not written down, we can say they are fairy tales or they didn??™t really happen.???

Stories of small bloodthirsty creatures with glowing red eyes, like cucuy or chupacabra, have been around for years under different names.

???Before the chupacabra incidents, there were stories of bat-like creatures living in the Sierra Madre,??? he said. ???Are people crazy with nothing better to do, or is there something happening????

In September 2004, a giant squid was captured on film for the first time, further cementing the existence of this once-mythical beast. Livsey hopes the same can be said for monsters along the border some day.

???With research, one day we will find answers to these mysteries,??? he said.

Medrano said people often try to explain the unknown using terms that are familiar to their culture, such as spirits, ghosts, aliens or monsters.

???When something unknown happens, oftentimes, you say ???The devil did it,??™??? he said. ???The chupacabra is a little more contemporary and a little more rural, while the cucuy is more urban and indoors.???

Independent filmmaker Henry Serrato premiered his mockumentary ???Search for the Chupacabra??? in the 2005 CineSol Film Festival. The film mixed real and rehearsed interviews with people discussing how the chupacabra has become a modern cucuy for some parents.

???Mexican??™s don??™t practice ???time out,??™ so they put the fear of the bogeyman, the chupacabra or La Llorona in their children,??? Serrato said. ???Overtime the chupacabra just got tied in with Hispanic culture, even though it has not been around as long.???

Although seen as modern ???urban legends,??? monster stories are still used in indigenous parts of Latin America to keep children and adults inside at night.

???Once night falls, that??™s when the creatures come out,??? Zavaleta said. ???Those fears are universal, it??™s not just children.???

Different theories may be offered to explain away unknown monsters, but witnesses say nothing can challenge what they??™ve seen.

In the early 1970s, Alex Resendez, along with his wife and son, saw what has been dubbed the ???Big Bird.??? Like the chupacabra, the giant bird was linked to livestock deaths, and like the cucuy, children were told it could come for them.

???I saw the bird twice, one time here in Brownsville and one time by Mission,??? Resendez said.

The big bird menaced people in the 1970s, and the chupacabra was a blamed for animal deaths in the 1990s.

Serrato wonders if it isn??™t time for a new cucuy to take the spotlight.

???Maybe another creature to pop up again, maybe it??™s due for an appearance,??? he said.

Whatever name is called, and whether or not it is ever caught, the cucuy will continue to frighten little children, and keep wary adults watching the shadows at night.

Source: The Brownsville Herald
http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/ts_comments.php?id=P67839_0_10_0

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Fuel's Paradise? Power Source That Turns Physics on its Head

It seems too good to be true: a new source of near-limitless power that costs virtually nothing, uses tiny amounts of water as its fuel and produces next to no waste. If that does not sound radical enough, how about this: the principle behind the source turns modern physics on its head.

Randell Mills, a Harvard University medic who also studied electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claims to have built a prototype power source that generates up to 1,000 times more heat than conventional fuel. Independent scientists claim to have verified the experiments and Dr Mills says that his company, Blacklight Power, has tens of millions of dollars in investment lined up to bring the idea to market. And he claims to be just months away from unveiling his creation.

The problem is that according to the rules of quantum mechanics, the physics that governs the behaviour of atoms, the idea is theoretically impossible. "Physicists are quite conservative. It's not easy to convince them to change a theory that is accepted for 50 to 60 years. I don't think [Mills's] theory should be supported," said Jan Naudts, a theoretical physicist at the University of Antwerp.

What has much of the physics world up in arms is Dr Mills's claim that he has produced a new form of hydrogen, the simplest of all the atoms, with just a single proton circled by one electron. In his "hydrino", the electron sits a little closer to the proton than normal, and the formation of the new atoms from traditional hydrogen releases huge amounts of energy.

This is scientific heresy. According to quantum mechanics, electrons can only exist in an atom in strictly defined orbits, and the shortest distance allowed between the proton and electron in hydrogen is fixed. The two particles are simply not allowed to get any closer.

According to Dr Mills, there can be only one explanation: quantum mechanics must be wrong. "We've done a lot of testing. We've got 50 independent validation reports, we've got 65 peer-reviewed journal articles," he said. "We ran into this theoretical resistance and there are some vested interests here. People are very strong and fervent protectors of this [quantum] theory that they use."

Rick Maas, a chemist at the University of North Carolina at Asheville (UNC) who specialises in sustainable energy sources, was allowed unfettered access to Blacklight's laboratories this year. "We went in with a healthy amount of scepticism. While it would certainly be nice if this were true, in my position as head of a research institution, I really wouldn't want to make a mistake. The last thing I want is to be remembered as the person who derailed a lot of sustainable energy investment into something that wasn't real."

But Prof Maas and Randy Booker, a UNC physicist, left under no doubt about Dr Mill's claims. "All of us who are not quantum physicists are looking at Dr Mills's data and we find it very compelling," said Prof Maas. "Dr Booker and I have both put our professional reputations on the line as far as that goes."

Dr Mills's idea goes against almost a century of thinking. When scientists developed the theory of quantum mechanics they described a world where measuring the exact position or energy of a particle was impossible and where the laws of classical physics had no effect. The theory has been hailed as one of the 20th century's greatest achievements.

But it is an achievement Dr Mills thinks is flawed. He turned back to earlier classical physics to develop a theory which, unlike quantum mechanics, allows an electron to move much closer to the proton at the heart of a hydrogen atom and, in doing so, release the substantial amounts of energy he seeks to exploit. Dr Mills's theory, known as classical quantum mechanics and published in the journal Physics Essays in 2003, has been criticised most publicly by Andreas Rathke of the European Space Agency. In a damning critique published recently in the New Journal of Physics, he argued that Dr Mills's theory was the result of mathematical mistakes.

Dr Mills argues that there are plenty of flaws in Dr Rathke's critique. "His paper's riddled with mistakes. We've had other physicists contact him and say this is embarrassing to the journal and [Dr Rathke] won't respond," said Dr Mills.

While the theoretical tangle is unlikely to resolve itself soon, those wanting to exploit the technology are pushing ahead. "We would like to understand it from an academic standpoint and then we would like to be able to use the implications to actually produce energy products," said Prof Maas. "The companies that are lining up behind this are household names."

Dr Mills will not go into details of who is investing in his research but rumours suggest a range of US power companies. It is well known also that Nasa's institute of advanced concepts has funded research into finding a way of using Blacklight's technology to power rockets.

According to Prof Maas, the first product built with Blacklight's technology, which will be available in as little as four years, will be a household heater. As the technology is scaled up, he says, bigger furnaces will be able to boil water and turn turbines to produce electricity.

In a recent economic forecast, Prof Maas calculated that hydrino energy would cost around 1.2 cents (0.7p) per kilowatt hour. This compares to an average of 5 cents per kWh for coal and 6 cents for nuclear energy.

"If it's wrong, it will be proven wrong," said Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace USA. "But if it's right, it is so important that all else falls away. It has the potential to solve our dependence on oil. Our stance is of cautious optimism."

Alternative energy

Cold fusion

More than 16 years after chemists' claims to have created a star in a jar imploded in acrimony, the US government has said it might fund more research. Mainstream physicists still balk at reports that a beaker of cold water and metal electrodes can produce excess heat, but a hardy band of scientists across the world refuse to let the dream die.

Methane hydrates

The US and Japan are leading attempts to tap this source of fossil fuel buried beneath the seabed and Arctic permafrost. A mixture of ice and natural gas, hydrates are believed to contain more carbon than existing reserves of oil, coal and gas put together.

Solar chimneys

Sunlight heats trapped air, which rises through a giant chimney and drives turbines. Leonardo da Vinci designed such a power tower and the Australian company Enviromission plans to build one. Despite being scaled down recently, the concrete chimney will still stand some 700 metres over the outback.

Nuclear fusion

Turns nuclear power on its head by combining atoms rather than splitting them to release energy - copying the reaction at the heart of the sun. After years of arguments the world has agreed to build a test reactor to see whether it works on a commercial scale. Called Iter, it could be switched on within a decade.

Wave generators

No longer a dead duck, the hopes of engineers are riding on bobbing floats again. The British company Trident Energy recently unveiled a design that uses a linear generator to convert the motion of the sea into electricity. A wave farm just a few hundred metres across could power 62,000 homes.

Source: The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0%2C3605%2C1627424%2C00.html

- ANYBODY 71757/100324_teleportation.jpg ld;">
Energy Vampires Do Not Need Fangs to Live

Energy vampires do not realize their harmful qualities.

A lot of people will probably say that they sometimes experience weird and unpleasant feelings after even a short conversation with others, whether it is a friend or a stranger. A person may feel fagged out and weary after such communication. As it turns out, these conditions can result from an "attack" of an energy vampire. Unlike fictitious vampires that climb out of their coffins at night and kill people drinking their blood, energy vampires need to absorb other people's energy. Energy vampire

Russian parapsychologist, Sergei Nikodimov, an expert of anomalous phenomena, is certain that energy vampirism is a part of every-day reality. "Numerous research works conducted by specialists of bioenergetics all over the world showed that all people can be conditionally divided into two major categories - vampires and donors. Each person radiates with live biological energy, which he or she can give to someone or take from someone. This quality of give and take forms with every human being during the moment of birth. If a baby is born as an energy vampire, this child is extremely capricious. When they grow, they try to follow parents everywhere on their heels and even try to sleep with them at night. As a rule, a person does not realize the need in other people's energy: the energy exchange happens on a subconscious level. However, a human body senses this invisible communication too and reacts with fatigue, headache, etc. A person may feel dog-tired at night and have absolutely no wish to get up in the morning. The loss of energy through human communication may also result in depression and weakened immune system," the professor said.

Sergei Nikodimov believes that energy vampires do not realize their harmful qualities. The majority of them may know nothing about dangerous effects that they show on other people: they act instinctively as a rule. "Energy vampires feel at times that they need to fill up their stock of biological energy just to be able to live well. They take this energy from the people around them, keeping up a normal state of health and damaging other people's physical state," the scientist said.

Brushing all those negative things aside, one may say that energy vampires can be very good individuals indeed. They can even suffer when they see the sufferings of other people, which they originally caused. To crown it all, vampires can give way to depression when they see that no one wants to be friends with them.

Energy vampires subconsciously provoke scandals to refresh themselves with the power of contradictions. Any person becomes defenseless in the sate of anger: this is exactly the moment, when vampires "feed themselves." They always try to visit the sites of tragic accidents. A lot of energy vampires can be passionate fans of sports games, such as football, for instance: huge stadiums accumulate a vast amount of psychic energy. Energy vampires hate being alone: they always need to have someone beside them, whom they can talk with at any moment. They usually say phrases like: "Stay with me a little, I am bored," or "Don't leave me alone, I'll die." In addition, they constantly want other people to feel sorry for them, which irritates donors and makes them give their energy away to vampires.

Source: Pravda
http://english.pravda.ru/main/18/90/360/16423_vampire.html