Jarvis says it's known that Anna Magdalena was a talented musician and a student of Bach's. Born in 1701, she married him in 1721, 17 months after the death of his first wife. She bore him 13 children, seven of whom died.

"I found Anna Magdalena's handwriting in places where it shouldn't have been," he told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. "In other words, assuming that the idea that it's her handwriting is correct, then it's in places where we really shouldn't be finding it."

Jarvis used forensic techniques to analyze the handwriting, saying the notations in her hand indicate she was working on a draft composition. Many works have no "original" score in Bach's hand.

He also studied the structure of the music before coming up with his theory. The British-born professor said he has felt there was something different about the Cello Suites since he studied them at the Royal Academy of Music in London.

"It doesn't sound musically mature. It sounds like an exercise, and you have to work incredibly hard to make it sound like a piece of music," he said.

He put forward the theory that the young woman wrote them when she was a music student. A woman's work as a composer would never have been acknowledged in Bach's time, he said.

Jarvis presented his ideas at an international symposium in London last week and will publish them in a doctorate paper later this year.

Bach scholars did not immediately dismiss Jarvis's claims. Yo Tomita, a Bach scholar based at Queen's University in Belfast, said the findings were "highly important." Others were more skeptical and said the theory could never be proven.

Bach, who lived from 1685 to 1750, was a prolific composer of more than 1,100 works, and is regarded as a great master of Baroque music.

"I have not seen anyone fund this," said food scientist Ted Labuza of the University of Minnesota. "It's not rocket science."

However, over the years Labuza and other cereal scientists have come up with some pretty good suggestions to explain where the noises come from.

Shattered glass

A Rice Krispie behaves like a piece of glass. If you hit it hard, it'll break into a puzzle of a million pieces that, if you had the patience, you could put back together again.

The high temperature at which the cereal's cooked creates extremely strong bonds that hold the rice's starch molecules together. The strong bonds make the rice act like glass.

During the cooking process, each piece of rice expands and a network of air-filled caves and tunnels form inside.

Under pressure

When you pour milk into your breakfast bowl, the cereal absorbs the milk. As milk flows into the crispy kernel, the liquid puts pressure on the air inside and pushes it around.

The air shoves against each pocket's walls until they shatter, forcing out a snap, or a crackle, or, as you, know, sometimes a pop.

You can also see tiny air bubbles escaping to the surface.

The race is now on. Because once the rice is wet enough, all the air pockets have burst, the sounds stop, and you're left in peace and quiet to eat soggy cereal.

NIOSH has linked exposure to diacetyl and butter flavoring to lung disease that sickened nearly 200 workers at popcorn plants and killed at least three.

"Now we've got cases of bronchiolitis obliterans among workers in other plants that use flavorings and in plants that make the flavorings," said Dr. Kathleen Kreiss, chief of the field studies branch of NIOSH's division of respiratory disease studies.

Bronchiolitis obliterans causes inflammation and obstruction of the small airways in the lung by rapid thickening or scarring. The irreversible condition is progressive and often fatal without a lung transplant.

Recent cases that NIOSH scientists have learned about include a man who worked at a small Baltimore-area flavoring company, a man who worked at a North Carolina potato chip plant, and an employee at a Chicago candy maker, and workers at a Cincinnati flavoring plant.

"We need to get into some of these plants because we don't have confidence that the flavoring industry has taken steps to actually prevent this disease, and we need to determine how widespread the exposure may be," Kreiss told The (Baltimore) Sun.

But while scientists at NIOSH and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration want to intensify investigations, agency leaders say they don't plan to act because they believe enough is being done now.

"OSHA advises its inspectors that workers may be at risk of overexposure to vapors of artificial flavorings in a variety of food processing work sites," said Al Belsky, a Labor Department spokesman.

"There is nothing to indicate that additional regulations are needed," Belsky added.

David Michaels, an epidemiologist at George Washington University's School of Public Health who examined OSHA's handling of the popcorn workers' sickness, called its inaction "criminal."

Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration has allowed flavoring producers and sellers to decide which chemicals are safe, and California's occupational safety agency has delegated health examinations of flavoring workers to an industry-paid doctor.

The difficulty of assessing workplace illness is further complicated by employees who fear reprisal for complaining about hazards and by physicians who lack the training to recognize bronchiolitis obliterans and other occupational threats.

About 70 U.S. companies are involved in the making and sales of flavorings, according to the Flavor and Extract Manufacturing Association, the largest trade group for the $3 billion-a-year industry. Of more than 8,000 employees, only about 3,000 are engaged in the actual production of flavorings. In the much larger food processing industry, however, tens of thousands of workers are estimated to work with flavorings.

More than 150 former popcorn plant workers have sued companies supplying or making the butter flavoring, and more than $100 million has been awarded in jury verdicts or paid in settlements. At least 30 suits are still pending.

The latest suit, filed in February, charges that the Flavor and Extract Manufacturing Association conspired with the other defendants to fraudulently conceal information about the health risks of butter flavoring.

"There is no conspiracy," said John Hallagan, the trade association's lawyer and former science director.

In 1985, consultants for the trade association produced a data sheet indicating that breathing diacetyl is harmful to the respiratory tract and is "capable of producing systemic toxicity."

Hallagan said his organization has cooperated with government scientists, held workshops for its members, and issued an August 2004 report on respiratory health and safety that remains on its Web site.

"I'm not sure what more we could have done to get the word out," he said.

The EVP was discovered during a taping of a seance at La Fortuna restaurant in New York, which Lennon frequented.

The show's organizers said psychic Joe Power's voice feed went dead for a few seconds and the message was found on it when the tape of the voice feed was played back.

EVP is based on a belief that spirit voices communicate through radio and TV broadcast signals.

On the television show, filming at La Fortuna suddenly stopped and a narrator said something odd has happened. Show participants said that a mysterious voice can be heard on Power's voice feed.

The producers called in "EVP specialist" Sandra Belanger to examine the voice and she proclaimed it Lennon's.

Producer Paul Sharratt, who heads Starcast Productions and calls himself a skeptic, said hearing the voice has made him a believer.

The program was made without the knowledge or consent of Lennon's estate or his widow Yoko Ono, who declined comment.

Ono's long-time friend and spokesman Elliot Mintz has called the entire exercise "tacky, exploitative and far removed" from Lennon's way of life. "A pay-per-view seance was never his style," said Mintz.

Lennon was assassinated by a deranged fan in New York 25 years ago.

Only 10 of the roughly 490 alleged "enemy combatants" currently detained at the facility have been charged; none has been charged with a capital offense.

That leaves the majority of the U.S. government's prisoners from the war on terrorism in limbo and its war crimes tribunal exposed to allegations by international human rights advocates that it is illegitimate and abusive.

The decision to release 141 detainees - the largest group to be reclassified and moved off the island - follows a yearlong review of their cases in which interrogators also determined that they could provide no further intelligence. It was unclear when or where the detainees would be released.

About 250 detainees have been released since the prison camps were established in 2002.

Longtime critics of the Guantanamo facility said the announcement of the planned release marked a milestone in the four years the base had held suspected terrorists.

The prison has been dogged by allegations of torture and has brought choruses of international condemnation, including calls from a United Nations panel and the European Parliament to shut it down.

The detainees determined by last year's Administrative Review Boards to pose no threat to U.S. national security are "no longer enemy combatants," explained Lt. Cmdr. Chito Peppler of the Pentagon office in charge of reviewing detainee status.

He contended that the men's detention had been justified. Battlefield commanders in Afghanistan and Pakistan had determined when the men were arrested that they were a threat to U.S. forces in the region, he said.

"Every detainee who came to the Combatant Status Review Tribunals went though multiple reviews" before their arrival at Guantanamo, Peppler said.

Although Peppler said the majority would be leaving the island "in the near future," he noted that some detainees who had been cleared might remain until an appropriate release site could be found. The government decided, for example, that minority Muslim Uighurs from China should not be handed over to their governments because they could face persecution, torture or execution.

Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director of Human Rights Watch, said the full significance of freeing the detainees could not be assessed until their fates were clear. Because of pressure from their governments, most European nationals have been released or transferred.

Many of the remaining detainees are from Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, Malinowski said.

Afghanistan has a process for granting amnesty to low-level Taliban members and prosecuting senior leaders of the old regime, making it an appropriate place to release the prisoners, he said.

"If they have committed crimes, we support their prosecution," Malinowski said. "If their crime was that they were Taliban, then they should be sent back to Afghanistan." Officials in Guantanamo would not release any information about the nationalities of the men cleared for release.

Pentagon officials have said previously that most of the men being held here were likely to be freed.

The former chief of interrogations, Steve Rodriguez, said in January 2005 that the majority held no further intelligence value.

Officials in Washington indicated last week that a group of about 120 Saudi prisoners could be released to their government.

A defense lawyer for one Saudi suspect said the government in Riyadh was doing little to expedite repatriation of its nationals.

"I believe the Saudi government could do much more like the British government has done" to take its citizens home, said Lt. Col. Bryan Boyles, whose client, Jabran Said bin Al-Qahtani, was to make his first appearance before the tribunal today.

The Army defense lawyer said Riyadh was being "unhelpful" by refusing to get involved.

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He noted that the British government's activism had resulted in the transfer and release of all British suspects who had passed through the prison network created by President Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Malinowksi of Human Rights Watch said transferring detainees into Saudi custody was troublesome.

"Saudi Arabia is not a struggling democracy," he said. "Anyone sent to a Saudi prison ... is in a worse place than Guantanamo."

Announcement of the pending releases coincided with a considerable drop in the number of detainees likely to be charged, suggesting that the U.S. government either lacks the evidence to convict more or - as defense lawyers and human rights monitors contend - feels little pressure to accord the terror suspects a speedy trial or due process.

Air Force Col. Morris Davis, the chief prosecutor, said earlier this month that the government was actively pursuing charges against about 70 additional prisoners.

But in a meeting with journalists on Monday, he said charges would be forthcoming on "about two dozen" other jailed suspects, including some who would face the death penalty.

Davis was responding to media questions as to why so few of the detainees - all described by defense attorneys as "small fry" - have been formally charged as the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks approaches.

"We're working on about two dozen additional cases," Davis said.

"I anticipate some of these will certainly present the possibility of death penalty cases."

The man steering the government's cases against war-crimes suspects insisted that some big fish had been ensnared in the U.S. counter-terrorism net.

"I think it's pretty significant when you're specifically training to build bombs to kill coalition forces," he said of three men who will appear before the tribunal this week on charges of having plotted to build remote-controlled explosive devices at an alleged Al Qaeda safe house in Faisalabad, Pakistan.

Davis conceded, though, that "they're certainly not Osama bin Laden, if you look at that as the top of the pyramid."

Boyles, Al-Qahtani's lawyer, expressed bafflement at the government's proceedings.

"I can't for the life of me figure out how they picked the people they've picked," he said. "If these are the worst of the worst, as the secretary of Defense alleges, then someone other than Osama bin Laden's chauffeur would be here."

He was referring to Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemen native whose challenge of the Guantanamo tribunal's legality is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court and is expected to be decided in late June.

The high court could take one of three paths, Davis noted: uphold the whole process, order modifications or deem the entire Guantanamo tribunal illegitimate.