"Some Quantum Physics Theories Suggest That When the Consumer Is Not Directly Observing This Product, It May Cease to Exist or Will Exist Only in a Vague and Undetermined State."

"HANDLE WITH EXTREME CARE: This Product Contains Minute Electrically Charged Particles Moving at Velocities in Excess of Five Hundred Million Miles per Hour."

"The Entire Physical Universe, Including This Product, May One Day Collapse Back into an Infinitesimally Small Space. Should Another Universe Subsequently Reemerge, the Existence of This Product in That Universe Cannot Be Guaranteed."

IT WAS beautiful, complex and wrong. In 150AD, Ptolemy of Alexandria published his theory of epicycles—the idea that the moon, the sun and the planets moved in circles which were moving in circles which were moving in circles around the Earth. This theory explained the motion of celestial objects to an astonishing degree of precision. It was, however, what computer programmers call a kludge: a dirty, inelegant solution. Some 1,500 years later, Johannes Kepler, a German astronomer, replaced the whole complex edifice with three simple laws.

Some people think modern astronomy is based on a kludge similar to Ptolemy's. At the moment, the received wisdom is that the obvious stuff in the universe—stars, planets, gas clouds and so on—is actually only 4% of its total content. About another quarter is so-called cold, dark matter, which is made of different particles from the familiar sort of matter, and can interact with the latter only via gravity. The remaining 70% is even stranger. It is known as dark energy, and acts to push the universe apart. However, the existence of cold, dark matter and dark energy has to be inferred from their effects on the visible, familiar stuff. If something else is actually causing those effects, the whole theoretical edifice would come crashing down.

The finding of a parrot with an almost unparalleled power to communicate with people has brought scientists up short.

The bird, a captive African grey called N'kisi, has a vocabulary of 950 words, and shows signs of a sense of humour.

He invents his own words and phrases if he is confronted with novel ideas with which his existing repertoire cannot cope - just as a human child would do.

N'kisi's remarkable abilities, which are said to include telepathy, feature in the latest BBC Wildlife Magazine.

N'kisi is believed to be one of the most advanced users of human language in the animal world.

About 100 words are needed for half of all reading in English, so if N'kisi could read he would be able to cope with a wide range of material.

Russian scientists have been unable to disprove a teenage girl who claims she has x-ray vision and can see inside human bodies.

Doctors at Saransk's children hospital carried out exhaustive tests on 16-year-old Natalia Demkina whose claims she has x-ray vision has gripped the Russian public.

But so far they have been unable to come up with a logical explanation for the vivid and detailed accounts she gives of what she sees when she looks inside the human body.

Scientists say that they have shown how the brain can crack complex mental puzzles while its owner is sleeping. Research at Luebeck university, in Germany, says tests on 106 volunteers back up anecdotal evidence that a good night's sleep can help solve problems. The volunteers were shown a number puzzle in which was embedded a "hidden code" revealing the answer, the journal Nature reports. Those kept awake overnight reportedly had far less chance of solving it. The scientists believe that because the brain appears to restructure information from the previous day during sleep hours, a period of sleep may produce insight into problems such as these. Other experts say it is the first hard evidence that creativity and problem-solving may be assisted by the activity of the brain during sleep. Dr Jan Born, who led the study, said: "This restructuring might be occurring in such a way that the problem is easier to solve." He highlighted a period of sleep called slow-wave sleep - a deep sleep not thought to be punctuated by dreams. Even small reductions in this sleep phase have been linked by other studies to a decrease in memory function, and in decreasing ability to recognise "hidden structures". Their 106 volunteers were all given a quick look at a test that involved sorting numbers based on a couple of set rules. However, underlying these rules was a third, "hidden" rule which, when spotted, dramatically simplified the completion of the puzzle. Some of the volunteers then got a full eight hours' sleep, while others had various degrees of sleep deprivation. The scientists then sat back to see which volunteers had a flash of inspiration and spotted the third rule and how quickly they managed it. Twice as many of the rested participants caught on to the rule than volunteers from the sleepless group.

The concept of the "order" of information is important here, as it is not the same as the opposite of disorder. If disorder represents a random sequence of events, then the opposite of disorder should imply "not random." Information is a sequence of data that is meaningful in a process, such as the DNA code of an organism, or the bits in a computer program. Noise, on the other hand, is a random sequence. Neither noise nor information is predictable. Noise is inherently unpredictable, but carries no information. Information, however, is also unpredictable. If we can predict future data from past data, then that future data stops being information. We might consider an alternating pattern ("0101010. . . .") to be orderly, but it carries no information (beyond the first couple of bits). Thus orderliness does not constitute order because order requires information. However, order goes beyond mere information. A recording of radiation levels from space represents information, but if we double the size of this data file, we have increased the amount of data, but we have not achieved a deeper level of order. Order is information that fits a purpose. The measure of order is the measure of how well the information fits the purpose. In the evolution of life-forms, the purpose is to survive. In an evolutionary algorithm (a computer program that simulates evolution to solve a problem) applied to, say, investing in the stock market, the purpose is to make money. Simply having more information does not necessarily result in a better fit. A superior solution for a purpose may very well involve less data. The concept of "complexity" is often used to describe the nature of the information created by an evolutionary process. Complexity is a close fit to the concept of order that I am describing, but is also not sufficient. Sometimes, a deeper order—a better fit to a purpose—is achieved through simplification rather than further increases in complexity. For example, a new theory that ties together apparently disparate ideas into one broader more coherent theory reduces complexity but nonetheless may increase the "order for a purpose" that I am describing. Indeed, achieving simpler theories is a driving force in science. Evolution has shown, however, that the general trend towards greater order does generally result in greater complexity. Thus improving a solution to a problem—which may increase or decrease complexity—increases order.

The scientists used tremors from earthquakes to probe the inside of the planet just as sound waves allow doctors to look inside a mother's. The technique, a greatly refined version of earlier efforts, produced a surprisingly sharp image and yielded the first direct measurements of giant spouts of heat, called mantle plumes, that emanate from deep within the planet.

Mantle plumes are believed to cause island chains, such as the Hawaiian Islands and Iceland, when the Earth's crust passes over the column of heat. Although accepted by most scientists, the existence of mantle plumes has been fiercely contested by a minority of researchers in recent years.

Suppose we start with the simple assumption that space and time are infinite.

Given some unlikely event- say that the proverbial roomful of monkeys banging away at a typewriter have a slim chance of typing out Romeo and Juliet…still with all of that infinite space and time in which to bang, it could happen. In fact, it does happen.

Slim chances are still chances.

Given all the time and space in the universe, a million to one shot will eventually shoot.

This is the basis for multiple dimensions. There are, in fact, 4 different flavors of multiple dimensions.

Flavor one: Scientists have theorized that somewhere, in this physical universe, out there is an earth just like this one, surrounded by eight planets, just like this one, and that on it is a you, just like this one. But that you may at this moment be turning off the radio and opting to do something else, while you, curious creature that you are, await the end of this story.

The reason you don’t see this parallel universe, is that it’s tremendously far away. There are millions of permutations, each far far away. So the chances of you running into your doppelganger is nil. (But then again, what did we say about chances?)

That’s flavor 1 – infinite space, parallel universes all in one.

Flavor 2 – has infinite space and infinitely varied time, and perhaps changeable physics. This theory says, okay, Bang! The universe begins to expand. But like eddys in water, there might be hot and cold spots. If the universe all expanded uniformly, time/space has a shot at uniformity too…but with this notion of eddys- actually “postinflation bubbles’, time would behave differently. (Remember discussions about the speed of light and relative time- well there you go!) In these bubbles, the initial conditions of the parallel universes, the very primordial soups, would be different. So not only do we have parallel universes, we have totally different pockets of alien physics. Maybe your doppelganger breathes methane and eats acid, has tentacles and does a mean eight-legged tango.

Flavor 3 – I do so want to explain this clearly to you, but I cannot because it assumes an understanding of quantum physics which I’ve been trying to wrap my head around now for 20 years. Shroedinger’s cat? The notion that thing are happening infinitely in the here and now, but that existence is based upon what you’ve observed, but that it does not necessarily connote the only reality – ow. It just hurts. It makes my head hurt. So that said- flavor 3, multidimensions, right here. Same spatial plane somewhere you can’t see. There. Listen to Adam Frank- he’ll explain it better.

Flavor 4 is entirely theoretical. We live in a world of 4 dimensions- the three dimensions of x, y, and z to locate position, and the fourth dimension of time. That can be represented mathematically. Some scientists posit that any mathematical formula represents some reality. Infinite variations on formulas suggest multiple dimensions beyond our puny 4 dimensional imaginings.

So there are Multiple dimensions.--lots of them.

I’d like think that in some alternate dimension, during my sophomore year of high school, I’d had a clue that Mike Simpson had asked me on a date – and that alternate me went. Or that several other times in the sad and promiscuous 80’s I’d said “no” more often to several other guys- and you can guess who you are.

It is an intriguing notion.

Still, My hope is that there are many different varied happy endings for us all.

The methods of manufacturing and compressing hydrogen gas require great amounts of energy. To overcome these challenges, scientists have been tinkering with the biological powers of everything from common yeast to mysterious bacteria living on the ocean floor. At the University of California at Berkeley, mechanical engineering professor Liwei Lin is busy developing a microbial fuel cell that runs off the digestive activity of baker's yeast. The yeast feed on glucose, a simple sugar, and digest it in a process called aerobic metabolism. "We extract electrons from the yeast cells where the aerobic metabolism process happens," Lin explains. Controlling the movement of electrons to harness a renewable source of fuel remains the target for scientists designing fuel cells, which extract power from electrochemical reactions. The advantage of Lin's mechanism is that it runs on glucose, a naturally abundant resource produced by plants.

TK = CFe + ZPE - SD - E+

Pardon me, says a reporter, shivering in the frigid dawn, but that sounds too good to be true.

"Everybody says that," says Appel. He is a tall, affable entrepreneur who has assembled a team of scientists, former government leaders, and deep-pocketed investors to develop and sell what he calls the thermal depolymerization process, or TDP. The process is designed to handle almost any waste product imaginable, including turkey offal, tires, plastic bottles, harbor-dredged muck, old computers, municipal garbage, cornstalks, paper-pulp effluent, infectious medical waste, oil-refinery residues, even biological weapons such as anthrax spores. According to Appel, waste goes in one end and comes out the other as three products, all valuable and environmentally benign: high-quality oil, clean-burning gas, and purified minerals that can be used as fuels, fertilizers, or specialty chemicals for manufacturing.

Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such as cornstarch into ethanol, this one will accept almost any carbon-based feedstock. If a 175-pound man fell into one end, he would come out the other end as 38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, as well as 123 pounds of sterilized water.