In declassified documents from the CIA's super-secret Science and Technology Directorate, it was revealed that some Cold-War-era cats were surgically altered to become sophisticated bugging devices. The idea was that the cats would eavesdrop on Soviet conversations from park benches, windowsills and garbage containers. The cat was meant to just stroll up to the sensitive conversations, completely unnoticed. The clandestine cat's electrical internals would then capture and relay the audio to awaiting agents.

The project was funded and work began in 1961. Former CIA officer Victor Marchetti recounts the story of the Acoustic Kitty:

"They slit the cat open, put batteries in him, wired him up. The tail was used as an antenna. They made a monstrosity. They tested him and tested him. They found he would walk off the job when he got hungry, so they put another wire in to override that. Finally, they're ready. They took it out to a park bench and said, "Listen to those two guys. Don't listen to anything else - not the birds, no cat or dog - just those two guys!"

After several surgeries and intensive training, the cyborg cat was ready for its first field test. The CIA drove the cat to a Soviet compound on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C., and let him out of a parked van across the street. The cat ambled into the road, and was struck by a taxi almost immediately. Five years of effort and over $15 million in spending were reduced to roadkill in an instant. Shorty after its demise a CIA operative returned to the accident site and put the cat's remains into a container to prevent the Soviets from getting their paws on the sensitive and expensive listening devices.

Operation Acoustic Kitty was completely abandoned in 1967, and declared an unadulterated failure. Possibly due to their embarrassing nature, the documents describing Acoustic Kitty remain partially censored even today. But one document does praise the Acoustic Kitty team for their efforts:
"The work done on this problem over the years reflects great credit on the personnel who guided it, particularly (censored), whose energy and imagination could be models for scientific pioneers."

While the memo says that the use of trained cats is possible, it also says that "the environmental and security factors in using this technique in a real foreign situation force us to conclude that for our (intelligence) purposes, it would not be practical."

Do you remember that awful feeling as a child on Christmas Day when Santa left you the toy you wanted . . . without any batteries? This feeling comes to me as I meet Sean McCarthy and Richard Walshe, two men making the claim that they are about to change the world - for ever.

These dynamic and personable businessmen from Dublin insist that they have found a way of producing free, clean and limitless energy out of thin air. And they are so confident that they have thrown down the gauntlet to the scientific community in a bid to prove that they have rewritten the laws of physics. Last week, frustrated that they couldn't persuade scientists to take their work seriously, McCarthy, Walshe and the other 28 shareholders of Steorn, a privately owned technology research company, took out a full-page advertisement in the Economist. In it, they called upon scientists to form a 12-member jury to decide whether their free-energy system is real, hoaxed, imagined or incorrectly well-intentioned.

So, as they prepare to demonstrate this wonder of science to me at their modest offices near the Liffey, I feel all the excitement of Christmas Day. There is a test rig with wheels and cogs and four magnets meticulously aligned so as to create the maximum tension between their fields and one other magnet fixed to a point opposite. A motor rotates the wheel bearing the magnets and a computer takes 28,000 measurements a second. The magnets, naturally, act upon one another. And when it is all over, the computer tells us that almost three times the amount of energy has come out of the system as went in. In fact, this piece of equipment is 285% efficient.

That's a lot of "free energy" and, supposedly, a slap in the face for one of physics' most basic laws, the principle of conservation of energy: in an isolated system (the planet, say), energy can be neither created nor destroyed; it can only be converted from one form into another.

"We couldn't believe it at first, either," says McCarthy, chief executive of the company. He is a 40-year-old engineer born in Birmingham but brought up in Dublin. After a couple of decades in the oil industry, McCarthy, Walshe and two others set up Steorn as a technology and intellectual-property development company. "We did difficult things. If someone had an idea that they wanted to make work, we'd work on it with them, help them recruit staff and get them through to their first product."

Then, by chance, came their "discovery". They were called upon by the police to help gain forensic evidence against "skimmers" who cloned the cards of people using ATMs. Subsequently, when banks approached asking how they could prevent such fraud, Steorn advised that the best way was to catch the small number of people committing most of the crime. They came up with a system of 16 tiny CCTV cameras that could guarantee recording the identities of the perpetrators.

"We wanted the cameras to be independently powered, so we tried out small solar and ambient wind generators," says McCarthy. "We wanted to improve the performance of the wind generators - they were only about 60-70% efficient - so we experimented with certain generator configurations and then one day one of our guys [co-founder Mike Daly] came in and said: 'We have a problem. We appear to be getting out more than we're putting in.'"

That was three years ago. Since then, McCarthy says, the company has spent £2.7m developing the technology. Steorn has also gone into partnership with a European micro-generator company to develop prototypes.

In Steorn's theory, fixed magnets could act upon a moving magnet in such a way as to make it a virtual perpetual motion generator. In an electrical appliance - a computer, kettle, mobile phone or toy - that would provide all the power for its lifetime. Of course, free-energy cars, power plants and water-pumping systems could follow. A better world indeed.

But then that Christmas Day feeling kicks in; doubts about the power source. According to McCarthy and Walshe, the marketing manager, there have been no fewer than eight independent validations of their work conducted by electrical engineers and academics "with multiple PhDs" from world-class universities. But none of them will talk to me, even off the record. I am promised a diagram explaining how the system works, but then Steorn holds it back, saying its lawyers are concerned about intellectual property rights. And that European partner, the one with the moving, almost perpetual, prototypes? It won't talk to me either and Steorn has undertaken not to name it.

"It's the Pons-Fleischmann factor," says McCarthy, and he and Walshe look at each other darkly. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann were the last experts to excite the scientific community with free-energy claims when, in 1989, they reported producing a nuclear-fusion reaction at room temperature - what happens in the sun at millions of degrees centigrade. The subsequent controversy resulted in the scientists being pilloried, even though the scientific community remains divided to this day over claims of "low-energy nuclear reactions".

"No one in the scientific community wants to become embroiled in the kind of controversy that Pons and Fleishmann faced," says McCarthy. "With our challenge, we're hoping to provide a respectable public platform for serious evaluation of the technology. Then, perhaps, scientists will feel confident enough to challenge the conventional view."

Certainly, the Steorn team seems genuine and well-intentioned. Walshe says that if the technology is accepted it will be licensed to manufacturers, but given away to electrical and water projects in developing countries. And, until their claims have been assessed by the jury, McCarthy says they won't be accepting any investor offers. So if this is a hoax, it would appear not to be a money-making scheme; Walshe says the Economist ad alone cost £75,000.

"Before we went public, we realised that if we're wrong it could have a very adverse effect on our business, so we're not doing this lightly," says McCarthy. "We expected stick, and we're getting it already. We've had a lot of abusive emails and telephone calls -people telling us to watch our backs, that sort of thing. Someone even published my home address on a website."

The conspiracy theorists are, indeed, having a field day in a forum section set up by the company on its website, www.steorn.com.

"We've been accused of being a publicity stunt for the next Microsoft Xbox gaming system because some of the artwork on our website was similar to theirs," says Walshe. "Some people have said our offices don't exist and one accused us of simply being a call centre in Australia because one of our telephonists has an Australian accent. My favourite is the one that says we are a CIA or oil-industry front intended to discredit research into free and clean energy. In other words, our claims are deliberately false and when they are found out to be, it will be a blow for all free and clean research."

Steorn says it has seven patents pending on its technology, though it is difficult to see what can be patented; magnets already exist and so do the 360 degrees of a circle. Yet it is the positioning of the magnets that seems to be at the heart of this "new" energy. And, as McCarthy points out, the Patent Office rejects inventions that fly in the face of such fundamental principles as, say, the conservation of energy. Nevertheless, as of yesterday, almost 3,000 people claiming to be scientists had expressed an interest in sitting on the Steorn jury. The 12 best will be chosen at the end of the month and then testing will begin.

"We've been advised it could take between a week and 10 years," says McCarthy. "We don't have any doubts. We've conducted meticulous research and we're getting such phenomenal results - up to 400% efficiency - that small glitches and errors in testing can be ruled out. We really believe we've found something that can change the world."

The rest of us can only wait and see. In the meantime, I ask Martin Fleischmann, the cold-fusion scientist, now 79 and retired, what he thought of the Steorn project.

"I am actually a conventional scientist," he says, "but I do accept that the existing [quantum electro-dynamic] paradigm is not adequate. If what these men are saying turns out to be true, that would be proof that the paradigm was inadequate and we would have to come up with some new theory. But I don't think their claims are credible. No, I cannot see how the position of magnetic fields allows one to create energy."

With great charm, Dr Fleischmann wishes the Steorn team luck. And if their "free" energy can light up a developing-world village or the eyes of a child with a toy, then perhaps we all should.

"The Minoan eruption of the Santorini volcano has remained of great interest to geologists, historians, and archeologists because of its possible impact on the Minoan civilization in Crete," notes the survey in the August 22 Eos journal. The Minoans were major players in the Eastern Mediterranean from roughly 3,000 B.C. to 1550 B.C, when the ancient Greeks, the same guys who went on to besiege Troy, took over. The late Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos in 1939 proposed that the eruption, a scant 70 miles away from Crete, caused the end of the Minoan civilization.

It was some blast, says vulcanologist Haraldur Sigurdsson of the University of Rhode Island, lead author of the Eos study. The total volume of material belched from the eruption was a mile-square pile of dirt stacked nine miles high, making the blast about 120 times more powerful than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, Sigurdsson says. The survey shows the Santorini Islands are surrounded by 530 square miles of volcanic rock on the ocean floor, in places close to the coast up to 260 feet thick.

The rock likely rode across the ocean waves at the time of the eruption, a superheated "pyroclastic" wave of light ash and pumice. In its extent, it exceeded the 1815 Tambora eruption that killed 36,000 in Indonesia, the study concludes, the previous record holder. Ash, pyroclastic flow and tsunami likely combined to similar, deadly effect in the Mediterranean, Sigurdsson says.

"This is extremely exciting news," says an expert on the Late Bronze Age Aegean, Eric Cline, who is currently chairman of the Classics department at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. "If the explosion were so much larger than previously thought, then we may have to look again at the potential impact that it had on Minoan Crete at the time, as well as upon Bronze Age civilizations as far away as Egypt, Turkey, and Mainland Greece."

The undersea survey also shows the nearby undersea volcano, Kolumbo, the largest of 20 volcanic cones around the islands, is still very much alive. An unexpected "widespread hydrothermal vent field was discovered on the floor of the Kolumbo submarine crater," the study says. Using robotic submersibles run by noted Titanic explorer, Robert Ballard, the team peeked 1,500 feet down into Kolumbo.

The floor of the crater is covered with bacterial mats, scattered among the vents, some of them belching 428-degree Fahrenheit steam. Sulfur-rich deposits of lead, iron and precious metals cover the vents.

The key issue for scholars in evaluating the volcano's effect is in resolving a dispute over the exact time of the eruption, Cline says. Some archaeologists, based on pottery and ancient Egyptian inscriptions, put the date at 1500 B.C. Experts in radiocarbon dating put it further back, to at least 1600 B.C. In April, a pair of new radiocarbon reports in Science magazine, one based on leaves and twigs buried in the eruption, overlapped to pin the date to between 1613 to 1627 B.C. Egyptologists such as Manfred Bietak of Austria's University of Vienna told Science they were unimpressed with the new dates however, so the debate continues.

Sigurdsson is convinced that the blast played a big role in the mythology of the ancient Greeks. "In my mind, personally, the mythology born out of this largest eruption must be responsible for the Atlantis legend," he says, referring to the lost continent of story and song. He also compares the event to the ancient poet Hesiod's work, The Theogony, which tells of the world's origins.

"The poem describes the battles between the gods and titans on Mount Olympus in language that nicely describes a volcanic eruption," Sigurdsson says. Stones are thrown, seas boil, smoke belches forth from the earth - all the stormy drama that mythology can muster. "Hesiod's ancestors lived to tell the tale after seeing something incredible happen in the sea and they interpreted a godly myth to explain what they had survived," he suggests.

He killed himself by jumping in front of a train after her escape last week. It is still unclear why he abducted her as she was on her way to school.

"Give me time until I can tell my story myself," Ms Kampusch said in a statement read by her psychiatrist.

She said she understood the media "curiosity" about her life with the kidnapper, but insisted that she would not answer intimate questions.

She said she and Priklopil had eaten meals and watched television together, and had jointly done the housework.

Priklopil "was not my lord, although he wanted to be - I was just as strong", she added.

She is at a secure location with psychological carers, and police say she has not asked to see her parents again after a brief reunion.

In her statement on Monday, she said she realised "how shocking and worrying" her experience must seem to people.

But she said she did not feel that Priklopil had robbed her of her childhood.

Together they had furnished her room "adequately" soon after he had abducted her, Ms Kampusch said.

She is reported to have wept inconsolably when she was told the man she had to call "master" was dead.

Mother frustrated

Police suspect she may have been suffering from "Stockholm Syndrome" - a condition where some abductees gradually begin to sympathise with their captors.

Her parents, who separated after her abduction, have complained that they have not been told where she is staying.

Her mother Brigitta Sirny has pleaded to be allowed to see her. She asked in a newspaper interview on Sunday: "Why can I not see my child?"

Austrian police officer Gerhard Lang said the police were not banning contact with Ms Kampusch.

He said she had voluntarily gone to a "safe place" to receive psychological care and protection.

Ms Kampusch, said to be pale and to weigh less than she did as a 10-year-old, managed to flee her abductor on Wednesday after he moved away to take a phone call as she vacuumed his car, it has emerged.

Priklopil threw himself under a train within hours of her escape.

Photos released by police show the underground hiding place in his house, in Strasshof village outside Vienna, where he had purportedly kept her.

The pictures show a small, cluttered, windowless room with wash basin, toilet, bed and cupboards and narrow concrete stairs leading up to a trapdoor.

A prominent anti-evolutionist and Roman Catholic scientist, Dominique Tassot, told the US National Catholic Reporter that this week's meeting was "to give a broader extension to the debate. Even if [the Pope] knows where he wants to go, and I believe he does, it will take time. Most Catholic intellectuals today are convinced that evolution is obviously true because most scientists say so." In 1996, in what was seen as a capitulation to scientific orthodoxy, John Paul II said Darwin's theories were "more than a hypothesis".

Last week, at a conference in Rimini, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Austria revealed that evolution and creation had been chosen as the subjects for this year's meeting of the Pope's Schülerkreis - a group consisting mainly of his former doctoral students that has been gathering annually since the late 1970s. Apart from Cardinal Schönborn, participants at the closed-door meeting will include the president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Peter Schuster; the conservative ethical philosopher Robert Spaemann; and Paul Elbrich, professor of philosophy at Munich University.

Last December, a US court sparked controversy when it ruled that intelligent design should not be taught alongside evolution theory. Cardinal Schönborn said: "The debate of recent months has undoubtedly motivated the Holy Father's choice." But he added that in the 1960s the then Joseph Ratzinger had "underlined emphatically the need to return to the topic of creation".

The Pope also raised the issue in the inaugural sermon of his pontificate, saying: "We are not the accidental product, without meaning, of evolution."

A few months later, Cardinal Schönborn, who is regarded as being close to Benedict, wrote an article for the New York Times backing moves to teach ID. He was attacked by Father George Coyne, director of the Vatican Observatory. On August 19, Fr Coyne was replaced without explanation. Vatican sources said the Pope's former astronomer, who has cancer, had asked to be replaced.