Ms Selway said her research used a geophysical technique called magnetotellurics - measuring the electrical conductivity of the earth to depths of hundreds of kilometres.

Probing the earth beneath central Australia, Ms Selway said she found northern Australia is more conducive than central Australia, and that the boundary between them extends to at least 150km in depth.

The results were evidence of a collision between northern and central Australia, she said.

"If you looked south from Alice Springs before 1.64 billion years ago, you would have seen an ocean," Ms Selway said.

"The huge forces involved in this collision produced volcanoes which actually helped create the crust of central Australia."

Ms Selway said many ancient structures, such as the collision zone, were hidden to traditional geographical probes by thick layers of younger sediment.

According to the Guardian daily, Perelman has said he will refuse a $1 million prize offered by a private math research institute in the U.S. which would be his if his solution is proven correct. And the upper echelons of the math world are buzzing with rumours that even if he is offered the award he will not accept it. The medals are open to mathematicians under 40 years old at the beginning of the prize year. Dr. Perelman turned 40 in June so this is the last year that he can win.

He has also refused a major European math prize, supposedly on the grounds that he did not believe the committee awarding the prize was sufficiently qualified to judge his work.

"I just don't see him turning up in a stretch limo with four over-endowed women and waving his cheque in the air. It's not his style," said Jeremy Gray, a math historian at the University of Oxford.

"I think he's a very unconventional person. He's against being involved in pageantry and idolatry," said Arthur Jaffe at Harvard University. "But he carries it to extreme which people might describe as a little crazy."

Little is known about Perelman, who refuses to talk to the media. He was born on June 13, 1966 and his prodigious talent led to his early enrolment at a St. Petersburg school specializing in advanced mathematics and physics. At the age of 16, he won a gold medal with a perfect score at the 1982 International Mathematical Olympiad, a competition for gifted schoolchildren.

After receiving his Ph.D from the St. Petersburg State University, he worked at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics before moving to the U.S. in the late 80s to take posts at various universities. He returned to Steklov about 10 years ago to work on his proof of the universe's shape.

The problem Perelman solved concerns the geometry of multidimensional spaces and is key to the field of topology. He claims to have solved a more general version of the problem called Thurston's geometrization conjecture, of which the Poincare conjecture is a special case.

"It's a central problem both in math and physics because it seeks to understand what the shape of the universe can be," said Marcus Du Sautoy at Oxford University, who will be giving this year's Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. "It is very tricky to pin down. A lot of people have announced false proofs of this thing."

The obsession with the problem, shared by several great mathematicians, has been dubbed Poincaritis.

But Perelman seems to have succeeded where so many failed. "I think for many months or even years now people have been saying they were convinced by the argument," said Nigel Hitchin, professor of mathematics at Oxford University. "I think it's a done deal."

Even the way he announced his proof - which took eight years to complete - was unusual. Rather than publishing in a peer-reviewed journal, he posted three manuscripts in an online archive of math and physics papers.

"He placed the papers on the web archive and basically said 'that's it'," Prof. Hitchin said. "A lot of details needed to be filled in. And there's a bit of squabbling in the background actually about who was first to fill in the details." The most recent of the papers fleshing out his proof runs to a mind-numbing 473 pages.

There is more than just professional acclaim at stake. In 2000, the Clay Institute in Boston, a private math research organization, established seven "millennium problems", each with a million-dollar reward for a solution. The Poincare conjecture is one, but Dr. Perelman has said he is not interested in the money. "There are all sorts of jokes going round the community that having a million dollars in St. Petersburg is quite dangerous," Prof. Hitchin said.

No one is quite sure what will happen if the Russian spurns the medal. "If he were to win it and turn it down it would be slightly insulting," said Prof. Du Sautoy. But it seems unlikely that Dr. Perelman, who recently relinquished his academic position, will care much about offending his peers. "He has sort of alienated himself from the math community," Prof. Du Sautoy added. "He has become disillusioned with mathematics, which is quite sad. He's not interested in money. The big prize for him is proving his theorem."

Last week AOL did another stupid thing, but at least it was in the name of science. The giant Web portal released a data chunk containing three months' worth of queries to its search engine taken from roughly half a million users. Gathered during the months of March, April, and May, the data shows queries, their date and time, and which Web sites the user ultimately visited. The idea was that this information might be of some use to researchers.

To protect user privacy, AOL replaced the log-in names of searchers with numbers. So you could still see everything that searcher #4356 looked for, but you wouldn't know who #4356 was, except for one problem: it's incredibly easy to figure out who people are based on their searches, because they tend to look for themselves, family members, and things in their immediate geographical vicinity. The New York Times did a great story in which reporters examined searches done by user #4417749 and within hours managed to locate their author, a nice old lady in Georgia who now plans to cancel her AOL subscription.

Bloggers and privacy advocates have pointed out that the information AOL released contains more than just the online search patterns of innocent Georgia ladies. It's unclear what law enforcement might do with the thousands of searches for illegal drugs and pornography. It's equally unclear what the feds will make of the handful of searches for "Muslim death rituals," "Muslim brotherhood," and "Islamic militant web forums." In a nation where the government is seriously contemplating blanket warrants for online surveillance, it's hard to imagine there aren't law enforcement types combing this treasure trove of prepackaged personal data. Imagine getting enough dirt on somebody to haul him or her in for questioning just by downloading 400 megabytes of stuff from AOL! That's like free candy.

After public outcry reached a crescendo, AOL apologized and took the data down. Of course, privacy advocates like the Electronic Privacy Information Center's Marc Rotenberg and the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Kurt Opsahl remain pissed off. Why? Because this is the Interweb, folks. Data never dies here. In fact, you can search the records yourself via DontDelete.com.

Once I visited Don't Delete, I couldn't leave. There's a button you can click to get the search terms from a random user, and every time I hit it, I got another gem. My favorite was user #4206444, obviously a college student trying to cheat quickly on his or her exams in order to get around to the more important things in life. Search phrases like "does social darwinism persist in social welfare policies and in the attitudes of the general public about social welfare" were followed by "free essays on adolescent depression and suicide risks" and "free essays on Charles Dickens Hard Times." In between these queries were hundreds for "sailor moon pictures," "pokemon pictures," "sonic x," and "selena pictures."

As blogger Thomas Claburn points out, there's a kind of poetry to some of the queries. He excerpts a dozen lines from the 8,200 queries made by user #23187425, all of which seem to be a sort of conversation this person was having with the search engine -- he or she never actually clicked on any links but just kept querying with plaintive phrases like "i have had trouble," "i want to change," and "i know who i am."

I'm torn. I love having access to this data, both for its touching human qualities and for the kinds of anthropological information it could yield. But as someone who believes strongly in digital privacy, I simply can't sanction what AOL did. It would be different if I had faith that discovering all those porn searches would somehow inspire people to accept that sexual curiosity is normal. And it would be different if I thought that law enforcement would consider that the people searching for "Islamic militant web forums" might simply be trying to understand the world. But I don't. This data will be used to "prove" that the Internet is crawling with child pornographers and terrorists.

Someday AOL's information should be put into the public domain for anthropologists and cultural researchers of the future. That future, however, is probably decades if not a century away. The data is too close to us now -- too easily weaponized. Nevertheless, I hold out hope that one day our search queries will illuminate us and provide for another generation a digital outline of our daily desires.

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd whose search history is known only to Google, which isn't exactly comforting.

Through his ministry and what he calls Spiritual Freedom Conferences, Larson teaches "the principles of spiritual freedom" and the "many ways that demons attack human beings," according to his Web site. Larson is the founder of an international fellowship of churches and has written 30 books, including such titles as "Larson's Book of Spiritual Warfare," an encyclopedia reference of demons, the devil and deliverance, and "Larson's Book of Cults."

Hall, who is under an overall deal at CBS Paramount TV, is writing the script and is executive producing the project with Roth.

This is the first major commitment for Joe Roth TV, which launched in late 2004 with a three-year deal at CBS Par TV and an initial focus on comedy development.

Roth is not a stranger to the subject of exorcism, having executive produced the 1990 feature film "The Exorcist III."

The Revolution Studios founder most recently executive produced the summer comedy "Little Man" and directed the drama "Freedomland."

Former "Judging Amy" executive producer/showrunner Hall most recently created and executive produced the CBS drama pilot "Ultra" this past development season. The project, from CBS Par TV, centered on a city-girl superhero.

Larson hosted the syndicated radio program "Talk Back With Bob Larson," which featured such topics as Satanism and exorcisms, and now hosts a radio and a TV show, both titled "Bob Larson Presents: Spiritual Freedom," that air on selected stations and on the Internet.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter