The report was completed in September but was not released publicly until a request was made earlier this week by Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, a Maryland Republican who has made several speeches in recent months warning that the world is in the grip of "peak oil" – a time of declining production and rapidly escalating prices. The theory is highly controversial, and the oil industry maintains that there are abundant untapped resources, although admittedly more expensive to develop than has historically been the case. In a speech on the House floor Tuesday night, Bartlett quoted extensively from the report.

"The Army operates in a domestic and world energy situation that is highly uncertain," the report says. Even its outlook on nuclear energy, a key component of Bush administration policy, is not positive. "Our current throwaway nuclear cycle will consume the world reserve of low-cost uranium in about 20 years," the report says.

The researchers conclude that the military needs to take major steps to increase energy efficiency, make a "massive expansion" in renewable energy purchases, and move toward a vast increase in renewable distributed generation, including photovoltaic, solar thermal, microturbines, and biomass energy sources.

Is there actually an increase in violent acts committed by teenaged girls these days? And if so, what are the reasons, and are we dealing with it?

In the 10 years leading up to 1998, there was a steady and significant increase in girl violence – it jumped by nearly 130 per cent. Then, according to the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, from 1999-2004 the total number of violent attacks (murder, assault, robbery) by girls stabilized at approximately 5-000 to 6,000 a year. The numbers are one-third of what they are for boys. Still, they are disturbing.

It's not surprising in a world whose mantra has been "Girl Power" ever since the Spice Girls popularized it, that young females are taking matters into their own hands.

Simon Fraser psychology professor, Marlene Moretti, lead investigator on the Gender and Aggression Project for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research cautions that: "There are programs aimed at teaching girls to be assertive, to believe in themselves, have a sense of self-esteem and not allow themselves to be pushed around or intimidated or drawn into a peer group.

"That's great if it's done appropriately. However, some families don't understand the difference between aggression and assertiveness."

There's no simple reason girls become aggressive and violent. Moretti says, "One size doesn't fit all. There are marginalized girls with low self-esteem who fall into the wrong crowd and become aggressive. They are girls who are both victimized and bullied by others. Then there are girls who are popular and are very oppressive – those girls often grow out of it."

Rebecca Godfrey, author of Under the Bridge: The True Story of the Murder of Reena Virk, learned a lot about violent girls when covering the trials of those charged in Virk's murder.

She says, "A lot of these girls came from violent environments. The fathers of two of the girls had been murdered and they were in very violent situations. There was nobody who came through for them, like a social worker or a program. The pop culture they were interested in was glorified violence, which influenced their sense of what was glamourous and powerful."

The media definitely plays its part in glamourizing tough girls. Think of the women in the Charlie's Angels movies taking down their opponents or Kill Bill's Uma Thurman meting out justice. Tough girls kick ass, right?

Moretti says if a girl doesn't have a lot to hang onto, images like these convey the message that this is a great way to be respected.

Of course, with female violence, as with just about everything else female these days, it's become sexualized. Think of the Seinfeld episode where Jerry drooled over thoughts of a "catfight."

When you combine these images with girls who already are dealing with the pressures of puberty you can easily create a ticking time bomb.

"Girls are already under pressure as they enter adolescence. They're competing for social status, and trying to be attractive. Wanting to feel part of a group, they can drift into groups of girls where they feel they can compete. Often that means being involved in aggressive behaviour with each other," Moretti says.

In his book See Jane Fight James Garbarino praises the physical outlet that sports has given girls for their energy and aggression, which he views as a positive thing. However, sports cultivates physicality that could translate into physical aggression, he says.

Still, the benefits outweigh the risks. Girls feeling good about themselves on a soccer field usually aren't the same girls angrily beating up another girl in the playground.

The other day I spoke with a teenaged girl who had fans cheering in the bleachers last year as she stood her ground in a fist fight with a male hockey player. However, a five-minute penalty for both players is certainly not what would happen in real life. Last week, when confronted with a female who wanted to settle things physically over a guy, the reality of possible assault charges and a fight with no hockey gear convinced that same girl that walking away was the best solution.

Boys are taught how to fight fair and are also cautioned about the implications. Godfrey says girls aren't that familiar with the rules of fighting.

"Boys know you only do one on one, and girls simply go wild. With the Reena Virk case, these same girls had attacked another girl several weeks before in a similar way, setting her hair on fire. In this attack, one of the girls was a kickboxer. You wouldn't have seen that 20 years ago."

Right now, the first step is to take the issue seriously. Godfrey maintains that, "Anything about teenaged girls seems to be trivialized and sexualized, and it shouldn't be."

Violence among teenage girls isn't sexy or funny or cool. But until society starts seeing that, it's going to be pretty difficult to deal with it.

Some social anthropologists and art historians focus on the most detailed examples of prehistoric art and see symbols of religion or mysticism. Guthrie looked at thousands of more rudimentary drawings that never make it into coffee table art books. He saw themes that have always seized young boys' brains, and stimulated them to draw -- large animals, bloody spears, male sex organs, voluptuous women.

"They're all naked, their boobs are exaggerated, their hips are exaggerated," he says of the female forms.

He contends that a large fraction of Pleistocene art is the work of boys learning to find their way in their world, and evolving into the people who make up our world.

He lays out his contentions in a new book, "The Nature of Paleolithic Art," published by the University of Chicago Press.

The theory has plenty of detractors.

French prehistorian Jean Clottes, co-author of "The Shamans of Prehistory," is a friend of Guthrie's and wrote a blurb for his book jacket but acknowledged that his theory is not likely to be accepted by other scholars.

Clottes said in an e-mail that the presence of children of all ages in caves has long been established by their footprints.

He also noted that next to elaborate cave drawings made by experts, often at heights that indicate they were made by adults, there are quite a number of doodles, marks on the walls and even crude drawings that children could do. But that they did so at play or for fun is an entirely different proposition, he said.

As for the subject matter, Clottes said, an interest in large animals, hunting and sex would not be confined to boys.

"Does it mean that adult men are not interested in these subjects?" he said.

The drawings and carvings are humans' earliest preserved art, pieces produced late in the Pleistocene Era, 10,000 to 40,000 years ago, across Europe and Asia.

It's a world before villages, churches, crops, dogs, houses and war, when people lived in bands of 20 to 40 and women valued men for their protection and their hunting prowess, because a good hunter meant survival and a lousy one meant starvation.

Most books on Pleistocene art focus on the best of the era, images produced by highly skilled hands. The Mammoth Steppe, the portion of the Northern Hemisphere that stayed ice-free while much of the Earth was covered by ice age glaciation, was rich in deposits of earth pigments, such as red, orange and yellow iron oxides. Paleolithic artists sometimes applied them by brush, sometimes by chewing and spitting in a fine, dry spray, producing a stipple.

"Most prehistorians think of adults doing all these things," Guthrie said. Many scholars also contend that most of the art was done by shamans for religious purposes -- pictures to please the gods, or bless a hunt or dramatize a shaman's vision.

Overlooked, Guthrie said, are thousands of less sophisticated drawings that he believes have a more mundane origin. More than half the population was teenage or younger. With artists' tools available, Guthrie said, it's highly likely youngsters were artists too, and their work just as likely to be preserved as works by experienced painters.

Instead of photographs, Guthrie illustrated his book with his own line drawings of Pleistocene art. His renderings allow comparisons between paintings, carving and etchings and focus the eye away from artistic qualities toward content, he said.

Guthrie says he didn't intend to focus on children as possible artists but was forced into the conclusion.

He was struck by the consistency of images across thousands of years and square miles. Mammoths, cave bears, lions, bison and wild cattle abound. Hunting scenes show animals stuck with spears, flowing blood, and sometimes attacking the hunters.

It's not graffiti, but boys playing, drawing for fun, using pictures to learn how to become men, across prehistoric cultures stretching from what's now Spain to Russia.

"You see the same things coming up over and over again, for a reason," he said. "It's their life."

There are also renditions of the female form, with sexual parts emphasized.

"People doing the art," he said, "were thinking of girls."

Many of the images are the kind of coarse, faceless pictures still drawn by 12-year-olds, not particularly erotic except to the young artist, Guthrie said.

"We're the same creature," he said. "Evolution hasn't given us a clean slate."

The artists probably were boys, the subgroup most likely to take risks, who left drawings deep in caves. People didn't live deep in caves and there was nothing back there they wanted, he said.

Guthrie contends it was a group most likely to engage in high-risk behavior who would take a burning pine bough deep into a cave and leave a picture behind: a testosterone-laden boy trying to prove himself to peers, girls and potential in-laws.

"Older women don't do that," he said. "Older men don't. It's a time in your life when you gain status by being risk-prone, not risk-averse. Everyone else is risk-averse."

He bolsters his contentions with forensic evidence. He digitized hand prints from 700 schoolchildren in Fairbanks, looking for characteristics of sex and age, and judged them against 200 hand prints found in 20 caves. He concluded that most hand prints he analyzed were male.

The book is biased toward art produced by males, he said. Boys weren't the only ones doing art, but they picked a medium that lasted. Paleolithic art likely included furs, leather, lace, braiding, weaving fiber and wood utensils lost to the ravages of time.

"They don't fossilize," he said. "What fossilizes are things of violence: antlers, ivory, bone."

Clottes said he does not believe the drawings were made by children:

"It runs counter both to the evidence of the caves -- the sophisticated panels made by 'professionals' in places where people did not live -- and to what we know from the ways of thinking of hunter-gatherers and, more generally, of traditional cultures: For them, the underground is a liminal or supernatural place, where one may go to access supernatural power or have ceremonies."

Caves were not a place for children to play or to make drawings as their whims moved them, he said.

Anyone who makes the fact public and encourages doctors to test for the condition and treat it can be sued for royalty fees. Any doctor who reads a patient's test results and even thinks of vitamin deficiency infringes the patent. A federal circuit court held that mere thinking violates the patent.

All this may sound absurd, but it is the heart of a case that will be argued before the Supreme Court on Tuesday. In 1986 researchers filed a patent application for a method of testing the levels of homocysteine, an amino acid, in the blood. They went one step further and asked for a patent on the basic biological relationship between homocysteine and vitamin deficiency. A patent was granted that covered both the test and the scientific fact. Eventually, a company called Metabolite took over the license for the patent.

Although Metabolite does not have a monopoly on test methods - other companies make homocysteine tests, too - they assert licensing rights on the correlation of elevated homocysteine with vitamin deficiency. A company called LabCorp used a different test but published an article mentioning the patented fact. Metabolite sued on a number of grounds, and has won in court so far.

But what the Supreme Court will focus on is the nature of the claimed correlation. On the one hand, courts have repeatedly held that basic bodily processes and "products of nature" are not patentable. That's why no one owns gravity, or the speed of light. But at the same time, courts have granted so-called correlation patents for many years. Powerful forces are arrayed on both sides of the issue.

In addition, there is the rather bizarre question of whether simply thinking about a patented fact infringes the patent. The idea smacks of thought control, to say nothing of unenforceability. It seems like something out of a novel by Philip K. Dick - or Kafka. But it highlights the uncomfortable truth that the Patent Office and the courts have in recent decades ruled themselves into a corner from which they must somehow extricate themselves.

For example, the human genome exists in every one of us, and is therefore our shared heritage and an undoubted fact of nature. Nevertheless 20 percent of the genome is now privately owned. The gene for diabetes is owned, and its owner has something to say about any research you do, and what it will cost you. The entire genome of the hepatitis C virus is owned by a biotech company. Royalty costs now influence the direction of research in basic diseases, and often even the testing for diseases. Such barriers to medical testing and research are not in the public interest. Do you want to be told by your doctor, "Oh, nobody studies your disease any more because the owner of the gene/enzyme/correlation has made it too expensive to do research?"

The question of whether basic truths of nature can be owned ought not to be confused with concerns about how we pay for biotech development, whether we will have drugs in the future, and so on. If you invent a new test, you may patent it and sell it for as much as you can, if that's your goal. Companies can certainly own a test they have invented. But they should not own the disease itself, or the gene that causes the disease, or essential underlying facts about the disease. The distinction is not difficult, even though patent lawyers attempt to blur it. And even if correlation patents have been granted, the overwhelming majority of medical correlations, including those listed above, are not owned. And shouldn't be.

Unfortunately for the public, the Metabolite case is only one example of a much broader patent problem in this country. We grant patents at a level of abstraction that is unwise, and it's gotten us into trouble in the past. Some years back, doctors were allowed to patent surgical procedures and sue other doctors who used their methods without paying a fee. A blizzard of lawsuits followed. This unhealthy circumstance was halted in 1996 by the American Medical Association and Congress, which decided that doctors couldn't sue other doctors for using patented surgical procedures. But the beat goes on.

Companies have patented their method of hiring, and real estate agents have patented the way they sell houses. Lawyers now advise athletes to patent their sports moves, and screenwriters to patent their movie plots. (My screenplay for "Jurassic Park" was cited as a good candidate.)

Where does all this lead? It means that if a real estate agent lists a house for sale, he can be sued because an existing patent for selling houses includes item No. 7, "List the house." It means that Kobe Bryant may serve as an inspiration but not a model, because nobody can imitate him without fines. It means nobody can write a dinosaur story because my patent includes 257 items covering all aspects of behavior, like item No. 13, "Dinosaurs attack humans and other dinosaurs."

Such a situation is idiotic, of course. Yet elements of it already exist. And unless we begin to turn this around, there will be worse to come.

I wanted to end this essay by telling a story about how current rulings hurt us, but the patent for "ending an essay with an anecdote" is owned. So I thought to end with a quotation from a famous person, but that strategy is patented, too. I then decided to end abruptly, but "abrupt ending for dramatic effect" is also patented. Finally, I decided to pay the "end with summary" patent fee, since it was the least expensive.

The Supreme Court should rule against Metabolite, and the Patent Office should begin to reverse its strategy of patenting strategies. Basic truths of nature can't be owned.

Oh, and by the way: I own the patent for "essay or letter criticizing a previous publication." So anyone who criticizes what I have said here had better pay a royalty first, or I'll see you in court.