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Dean Kamen, the engineer who invented the Segway, started out by inventing a wheelchair that can climb stairs. Many people felt that after this, the Segway was an anti-climax, and they haven’t done well on the market. But Kamen’s new idea, two devices that will bring electricity and clean water to rural third-world villages, could be inventions of major importance.

Erick Schonfeld reports that 1.1 billion people still don’t have access to electricity or clean drinking water. Kamen has invented two devices, each about the size of a washing machine, that can change all that. The water purifier creates 1,000 liters of clean water per day, no matter what kind of water you put into it. The power generator creates a kilowatt of electricity out of anything combustible.
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Ten people were killed as tornadoes swarmed across themidwest, while wildfires racing across the Texas panhandlekilled seven. The same weather system that drove the winds that spread the fires in Texas generated the tornados farther north. Springfield, Illinois was especially hard hit, withstraight-line winds gusting in excess of a hundred miles anhour. Virtually every building in the city suffered somesort of damage. Mayor Tim Davlin described the destructionas “unreal.” These storms, like Katrina, are consistent withglobal warming models, which predict unusual weatherviolence.
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A swarm of 31 earthquakes in the Andaman sea has caused the Thai National Disaster Warning Center to put the Andaman Islands on earthquake alert. The center is concerned that the earthquake swarm could indicate an impending underwater volcanic eruption of the kind that led to the tsunami that swept the area in December, 2004.

People living along the coast and fishermen are potentially in danger and are being warned to be on the lookout for the following signs of an underwater quake: changes in the ocean surface, including color and number of bubbles, and a smell of sulfur.

Let’s pray that the catastrophe of Christmas 2004 does not occur again.

Art credit: gimp-savvy.com
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We begin a two week series on prayer – but we’re not approaching it in a conventional way at all. Expect to be fascinated and surprised by this unusual exploration of one of the most common and least understood of human activities: prayer to a higher power. Listen as Bill Sweet of the Spindrift project tells the inspiring and terrifying story of discovery and death that surrounded this pioneering effort to solve the mystery of prayer through science. Then Linda explores a mystery that has scientists terrified: why is bird flu spreading so fast?

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