The sun is expanding and eventually the Earth will be toast. However, scientists have come up with a cunning plan....

Forget the ozone layer. If you thought global warming was caused by pollution and rampant deforestation, get set to be scared - Earth has a bigger problem.

The sun is expanding. The fireball that is mildly overheating us right now will toast us, then roast us to cinders, then engulf us. This isn't a piece of apocalyptic astrology but the conclusions of a study by astronomers Don Korycansky of the University of California, Michigan University's Fred Adams and Gregory Laughlin of NASA.

Luckily, the scientists have come up with an answer. As the sun gets hotter, all we have to do is move the Earth. They calculate that an asteroid 62 miles across, passing close to our orbit, would bounce us further into space like a billiard ball. It's called the 'slingshot effect' and is the same high-velocity physics which saved the astronauts of the Apollo 13 mission when they used the Moon's gravity to hurl themselves back to Earth. All we have to do is find the right asteroid and deflect it towards us. We'd better get the aim right, because if a 62-mile wide lump of inter-planetary rubble slams into Yorkshire, none of us will have to concern ourselves with global warming anymore.

Space isn't all bad news. Two US companies - Starband and DirecPC - have satellite dishes which pick up internet signals. The dishes require a clear view of the southern horizon, so they're little use to urbanites. But to Americans on farms or in the suburbs, the system represents affordable high-speed connection. Installation of Starband costs about £400, with a £40-plus monthly rental. DirecPC, launching later this year, could be cheaper. Users will get download speeds of upto half a megabyte per second - about 10 times faster than your average modem.

Signals travel 44,000 miles from the internet server, up beyond the atmosphere and into space, then back to your dish. That's taking the long route, but at the speed of light, it's a short trip of less than a second. The delay is to much for video-conferencing or even sophisticated gameplay, but it's acceptable for long-distance phonecalls and irrelevant to email and online chat.

I predict satellite weblinks will soon be the norm, enabling anyone to connect at high speed to the internet wherever they are, even on the move.

The Alpine global positioning technology in my car can pinpoint my position to within a few yards anywhere in Europe - the same satellites could soon deliver websites at lightning speeds to my notebook. Oh, and don't worry too much about those US astronomers and their expanding-sun-theory - the first effects aren't expected to hit us for another thousand million years.

Whatever 'IT' is, millionaire inventor Dean Kamen's mystery creation of that name is the world's worst-kept secret. Within hours of news leaking out of his DEKA Research and Development Corporation, the net was buzzing that the 'inventrepreneur' had created a strap-on anti-gravity device. or a scooter that ran on water. Or a car that folded Lip into a briefcase.

Or a shopping trolley-hovercraft ? Or a one-wheeled pogo-stick stabiised by gyroscopes.

Even the President's staff had a go. Tom Kalil, deputy director at the White House National Economic Council, said: I think the notion that IT stands for Individual Transport is the most plausible guess. Wouldn't a jet-pack be cool?'

Kamen was fuming That the turnouts were abroad, following reports of a $250,000 deal for his book that would break the news. He was also aghast that speculation seemed to outstrip even his own rocket-powered imagination. "Expectations are beyond whimsical!" he complained, and has since said the invention is not as revolutionary as some suggest.

The excitement was stoked by Apple chief executive Steve Jobs, who declared: "If enough people see the machine, you won't have to convince them to architect cities around IT."

Bob Metcalfe, founder of 3Com hinted at the machine's nature when he said: "If I invented metal and came out with the first spoon, which would be the big invention - the metal or the spoon?"

Kamen's biggest invention to date is the iBot Transporter - a six wheeled mobility device' for the disabled. It climbs stairs, crosses rocky terrain and even does a wheelie to help its user to stand upright. After $50 million and eight years in development, Kamen took an iBot to Paris, strapped himself in and climbed the Eiffel Tower.

Kamen used to live on North Dumpling Island in Long Island Sound, commuting by helicopter. The island has seceded from the United States - Kamen signed a non-aggression pact with President Bush. Clearly, this is a man who likes big gestures but who is also intensely humanitarian. The iBot was inspired by Kamen seeing a man trying to maneuver a wheelchair up a kerb.

Whatever IT is, I predict the technology that underlies it will be profoundly eco-friendly. Maybe Kamen has cracked the problem of running a hydrogen engine economically, inventing a motor where the only exhaust waste is distilled water. If that's the case, Kamen will have to fight the oil cartels and the US car industry. Then the imagination really starts to boggle.

Sick of Love
January 27 - February 09, 2001

Uri asks why - despite the technological advancements of recent years - we still remain such fools for love.

On Valentine's Day, don't switch on your PC - pull the leads out at the back. Use the DVD drive as a cup holder and write your memos in ink.

Love and computers don't get along. That's hardly surprising, since passion and programming are opposites. Computer code is all about logic : black and white, 1 or 0. Love leaves logic in the dust/ Any matchmaker knows the hardest trick is to marry two compatible people. The incompatibles can't keep their hands off each other - Montagues fall for Capulets, presidents woo interns. But when ordinary, unattached boy meets plain, single girl, the chemistry between them fizzles out in an instant. Love isn't logical.

The worst virus to sweep the internet, wiping out billions of gigabytes, was created by a schoolboy hacker who had a cruel insight into human weakness. : write "I LOVE YOU" in the subject line of an email and recipients will be irresistibly tempted. They'll peek at the attachment labelled "loveletter" - and once opened, the virus activates.

The virus code inside last year's Love Bug was nothing new but it infected the planet like a strain of Venusian influenza, virulent and incurable, because of the psychological twist. The twist was love and it tied a naughty knot in the internet once more at Christmas, when a boastful lawyer called Brad thought he could trust a saucy little secret to the internet email system at his City law firm. A girlfriend called Claire had just sent him a very friendly email, praising his - well, let's just leave it at 'very friendly'.

Within an hour, their very private email was public, zapping like a virus between offices across Europe, the US and Australia. Claire's compliments went viral and the whole planet caught this bug. It's one of the internet's most fascinating quirks - how one site or message can become an international obsession.

Hackers and marketeers try to copy the pattern but very few email viruses or spams last more than a few hours. When things go "viral", like amihotornot.com, or Mahir's lonely hearts homepage, they infect us for weeks.

The laziness of email is one reason. Most of us forward our 'funnies' to a preset group of friends with one keystroke - instant gossip. But the central factor is chaotic : there is no way to predict what will go viral.

If you think it's hard to tell the next Hollywood blockbuster apart from the flops, spotting the next net sensation is even tougher. There's one common symptom : love is usually mixed in. For that virus there's simply no cure.

Palestinian teenagers are showing their anger at the current political deadlock by taking to the streets with rocks and petrol bombs. Tragically dozens have been killed.

Israel has declared cyber warfare illegal, making it unlawful for hackers to break into Arab sites and festoon them with Jewish symbols. The law appears ridiculous. Parents should be delighted when their youngsters respond, not by rioting but by using their computer expertise to deface web pages. But in a region desperate for peace, any aggression - even one in parallel, virtual world - can have terrifying repercussions. When the world's diplomats are struggling for solutions, teens with a talent for hacking are not welcome.

"We need to explain to the Israeli public that we are not a country of piracy and that children should not be declaring war," said Michael Eitan, head of the Government's Internet Committee. "We are not talking here about a game but rather about taking risks with the national and international infrastructure."

He is not exaggerating. Israel has the most computer literate population on the planet, with the highest proportion of PCs to pupils. The Jerusalem Report quoted a hacker identified only as SfromtheSOUTH, who boasted : "There's no internet service provider in the Arab world that couldn't be knocked out in 15 minutes. In an internet war, the sky would be the limit."

He added with relish : "Maybe you can all it the nerd's revenge. The Arabs can blow up buses but nerds can blow up computers."

Much of the nerd's revenge is puerile - a web gateway based in Jordan was garnished with a picture of Yasser Arafat as a pig, in a situation that would even make a pig blush.

The response of Arab net-users was ferocious. Chain-letter emails went out to sympathisers in Europe and the US, demanding retaliation and calling for an electronic jihad or Holy War.

One claimed : "The more money the Israelis lose in fixing and strengthening their systems means less money to buy bullets and rockets for use against our children...maybe you can't hold a gun and fight, but you can contribute to the struggle."

The idea that a PC in the bedroom becomes a weapon of war is a chilling one. The net is our best hope of improving education globally - to abuse it for warfare is a crime worse than burning books.

Michael Eitan believes : " The solution to the problem is that there will be an international pact that demands ther prosecution of anyone wreaking havoc on the net." I call on the British Government to seize that lead. The nerd's revenge threatens us all.

To write this column, I printed out 27 sheets of tightly-packed type. Press releases, news reports, company mission statements - approximately 12,000 words and 20 documents.

With the papers fanned around my keyboard and a fistful of multi coloured highlighters, I marked the most intriguing paragraphs. Then I bengan scribling on post-it notes.

This isn't how it's meant to be. I'm writing about innovative software for the UK's best-selling computer publication - the first time these words see paper should be when they appear in the magazine you're holding.

But I can't spread my screen across my whole desk. On this 19-inch VDU it's impossible to view and highlight 20 documents at once or even 5 documents. All I can do is stack my windows up like a pile of dirty dishes.

Architect Mike Rosen has engineered a brilliant solution. His company, 2ce (Pronounced "to see"), is launching a three-dimensional web browser which displays multiple pages as though they were pasted all over the innards of your monitor.

The effect is like standing inside a cube. There's a wall ahead of you, displaying your main document, and walls to either side. Above and below, more documents are on the ceiling and floor. One click and you turn to face the page behind you.

Rosen says : "When I was designing this, I knew the room metaphor would be very easy to navigate, and intuitive. It's very architectural."

The unnamed browser will be available as a free download from www.2Ce.com next year. It's aimed chiefly at business users who want to keep an eye on two or three stock reports at once, while working on a spreadsheet and flicking through a diary or database.

But Rosen's vision is for everyone to work in 3d, on six surfaces : When you turn on your PC in the morning, this is what you'llsee.".

Browsers are the software which will link all our electronic devices, from TV's to fridges to phones to stereos. Netscape, which gave the worldwide web it's 'magazine' look with it's Navigator browser, is developing a new browser called Gecko, which works in all kinds of wired-up ways.

Gecko will survey the supermarket shelves from inside your fridge, connect to e-stores from your TV, download the latest scores to your phone and pipe MP3 music into your stereo. All the applications already exist in different forms - Gecko simply unites them.

If browsing-by-cubes takes off, the next generation of Gecko browsers would be 3D. That means watching six channels simultaneously on TV, rolling around to dodge the adverts and flipping between shops to compare prices, just by turning your head.

Taking Tetris to bed
December 14 - 27, 2000

According to my encyclopaedia of divination, to dream of money foretells change. Dreams of failing revael hidden fears, dreams of flying accompany an escape from trouble and dreams of computer games foretell a major discovery in brain science.

Researchers at Harvard medical school in Boston who analysed the sleeping minds of 27 subjects found prolonged sessions of the classic game tetris flooded back as the players nodded off.

Anyone who has played tetris won't be surprised. The simple and addictive puzzle stimulates hand-eye co-ordination, as coloured blocks tumble down to be slotted into place like a jigsaw.

In an inspired twist to the experiment, research leader Dr. Robert Stickgold included five amnesiacs among the subjects. These people had no short term memory because of brain damage sustained to the hippocampus. Within hours of logging off, they had no conscious recollection of having ever played tetris.

But as they dropped off to sleep, the PC images filled their minds.

Stickgold says that this proves that dreams draw on the subconcious rind of the brain, the neocortex, which is divorced from the hippocampus and it's grip on time.

It explains why dream events seem magical - and why they cannot be contrlled from outside. It also suggests that when we gain skills at computer games, we are involving our whole brain- not just the conscious 10 percent that we use from day to day.

My recent piece about research at Eastern Virginia Medical School to reach children with attention deficit disorders by using video games provoked my biggest-ever mailbag from Computeractive readers. Now the harvard researchsuggests that any student can benefit.

Teachers know that few pupils absorb a spoken stream of dates and facts - and even fewer remember them after a night's sleep. If information can be given in video-game format, however, the whole brain will absorb the information.

This type of learning ought to be second nature to humans. After all, Australian zebra finches can do it, according to University of Chicago scientists. A team monitored the brain waves of sleeping finches and discovered they were identical to the patterns of the birds' minds when they listened to recordings of their own songs.

In other words, inches do their revision when they're asleep. That's a technique any human student would love to perfect.

Breaking in is easy to do
November 30 - December 13, 2000

Uri worries the microsoft hack-in may have been a dry run of something more serious.

Listen to me! Don't look around! Raise the magazine closer to your face. We are being watched. I can't see the spies. But as an Israeli intelligence operative once told me seriously : "If they're invisible, you know they're KGB."

In post-Yeltsin Rssia, the state intelligence network is now called the FSB. In the economic chaos of the late 1990s, some FSB operatives turned to the more lucrative business of hacking. Hacking in Russia could soon be as commonplace as homebrewed vodka. Vladimir Levin is famous in St. Petersburg: he was caught transferring $10 million from Citibank customer accounts into another bank. Moscow Conservatory student Ilya Hoffman stole nearly $100,000 in a credit-card scam.

An underground magazine called Khaker details the best new sites for "script monkeys" - webpages where teenagers with lots of time and no money can download ready-made hacking packages. But something more complecx than a script-monkey code cracked Microsoft's firewalls, the rings of electronic security that guard the systems of the world's biggest software firm.

Executives at the Seattle company were stunned to discover a hacker operating from St. Petersburg had wormed into theirsystems. For three months he had been mailing out the source-code of Microsoft's crown jewels, Windows and Office. Security experts say the break-in could have been effected with a "Trojan Horse" program such as QAZ, which uses email to open a back door into the target computer. But if FSB operatives were involved, the method

was probably more insidious : a Microsoft employee was bribed or even blackmailed to give access to the spies.

Chief Executive Steve Ballmer tried to put a good spin on the news. "I can assure you there has been no compromise o the integrity of the source-code and that it has not been modified or tampered with", he said.

The hackers probaly didn't want to rewrite Windows. The data could be held for blackmail, to force multibillionaire Bil Gates to pay a vast ransom or see his precious source -code published on the Internet. Or it could have been a stock-market scam.

Ballmer's worst nightmare must be that this was just a dry run. Next time the hackers would try to plant a cookie in the source-code, and every keystroke in certain online functions wil be relayed to a remote server.

When you fill in a credit-card form online, for instance, the hacker's software hidden in your standard-issue Microsoft program might instantly relay all yur details to an anonymous address in St. Petersburg.

Like the spy said...if they're invisible, they must be KGB/

Read Uri Geller's online novel, Nobody's Child at www.uristory.com. Visit Uri and www.urigeller.com

New Life for old habits
November 16 - November 29, 2000

Uri discovers that computers can alow us to rediscover the satisfaction offered by old technologies

Old technology i making a comeback. Radio, telegrams, vinyl LPs and fiction published in instalments are all making an impact on my life.

I'm not getting retro for the sake of it. I love new stuff. But these old favorites are being delivered digitally, in handy formats, and I'd forgotted how good they were.

Tuning in to broadcasts from halfway round the planet on longwave radio thrilled me as a young man in Israel. A friend had a wireless set with an aerial twice as hih as a house, and we could pick up Voice of Americe an it's Russian propaganda sister sation. Sometimes we een stumbled on broadcasts rom Africa or Eastern Europe. This week I downloaded tuner software from www.real.com which gives me instant acess to 2,700 radio stations worldwide. The delicate tuning dial is replaced by point-and-click. I choose a map of any country and select a broadcaster from the list. Within 5 seonds I'm listening in.

My favourite is Antarctia's Anetstation, beaming cool guitar sounds from the frozen base of the world. Sound quality is good, though I sometimes lose the signal for a ew moments.

My vinyl collection is being transferred to mp3, so I can listen to battered 70s LPs as easily as I can play CDs - and without the risk of damaging the vinyl further. I'm plugging my trntable and amplifier into the back of my PC, switching the mp3 software to 'record' and that's it. An LP takes up about 40MB on the harddisk.

I've started sending text messages on my mobile. Until I tried it, I couldn't see the point. I thought, if you want to pass on as message, say it over the phone; if you want to write, send an email. Then I tried 'texting' and realised that six words et the point across instantly. Phoning can be messy - in all that small-talk, the message gets lost. But text is uncluttered: 'Flight delayed. Collect me at 6pm.'

It's like a telegram; focusing on the core of the message in the fewest posible words. Like any tool that focuses the mind on what's essential, 'texting' helps me think clearly.

But my major obsession right now is really old technology - the 19th century technique of publishing a book in weekly installments. My latest novel, Nobody's Child, about a TV gameshow with a baby asfirst prize, is being seralised via email. Geting the database programming has been a headache, but at just 20p per chapter, I believe stories sent directly from writer to reader will revolutionise publishing.

Uri Geller's novel Nobody's Child is being published exclusively online at www.uristory.com.

Memory in an instant
October 20 - November 3, 2000

Fingernail-sized chips with infinite memory could soon recall every moment of our lives, says Uri

Curious, but I remember the song that played on the radio as I waited in make-up, before my first BBC appearance on the Dimbleby show. It was Ringo Starr singing Octopus's Garden.

That was long ago. Why do I remember it ? The moment was so important to me; the song was not.

Human memory, sometimes intense and crystal clear, sometimes flawed, often absent, is not fully understood by neuroscientists. There are some things you never forget : what you were doing when you heard of Princess Diana's death; your outfit on your first date.

There are others you cannot remember, though they are familiar : try to imagine the face of a good friend...it's difficult.

The mystery may soon be unimportant. Human memory is about to be superceded by something infinitely more powerful.

IBM's resaearch group in Zurich has developed Millipede, a technology enabling 500Gb of data to be stored on a wafer of polymer one inch square. An array of 1024 white silicon needles jb holes in the square, creating a landscape of plateaus and wells. These are read as digital ones and noughts.

Project manager Peter Vettiger hopes to replace the silicon with carbon nanotubes, a single atom wide, which will enable the cards to be shrunk to the size of a fingernail. That could put the momry power of 100 PCs on th face of your watch or the buttons of your cellphone.

Kevin maney, technology editor of USA Today, predicts we will soon store every event of our entire lives on a single memory card. Microphones will pick up all our conversations. Bar-code scanners will recall every item we pick up in the supermarket. Every email we read, webpage we download, will be etched forever on a device weighing only a few grams.

Rick Rashid, head of Microsoft research, foresees problems : "Every conversation you've ever had...how would you index all that data ? Howwould you find it ?"

The prospect of losing a gadget detailing every waking moment is terrifying - even the most blameless life is full of embarassing detail. And the threat to civil liberties is incalculable : anyone suspected of a crime might have to prove the innocence of all their actions.

The benefits outweigh all these anxieties. Computer diagnosis of lifestyle patterns, coupled with DNA scanning for defective genes, could make almost any disease preventable. That would be an unforgettable breakthrough.

Phantom atoms may give rise to limitless computing. So who you gonna call ? Uri Geller!

Do you believe in ghosts ? IBM does. It's quantum physicists believe they have created phantom atoms which could one day act as the circuitry of a supercomputer that isn't really there - the ultimate 'ghost in the machine'.

Donald Eigler, at the labs in San Jose, California sums up the paranormal essence of his ethereal atom : "It's a quantum mirage. It's also a physical object."

By fencing a pool of electrons on a copper bed, Eigler made a rippling oval droplet of sub-atomic particles. At almost 270 degrees Celsius below freezing, he fixed an atom of Cobalt at one end of the pool.

Electrons swarmed around it. They swarmed at the other end too, around an atom that showed up more faintly...because it didn't exist.

Eigler and the IBM team admit they have no idea what is happening. Bu their results were striking enough to make the cover of Nature, the world's most prestigious scientific journal.

The research may provide stimulus to the debate about the existence of ghosts. The latest psychological theory says ghosts are simply a side-effect of over-excitement in the brain's temporal lobes. But atoms don't have brains.

The IBM phantom could also be the key to quantum physics' greatest challenge - how to look inside an atom without disturbing it's mysterious balance.

Sub-atomic particles such as quarks, exist as a fuzzy cloud of possibilities, until an observer forces them to make up their minds. Before the intrusion of the outside world, a quark is here, there and everywhere...all at the same time.

IBM wants to harness that fuzziness and use it to replace plodding, slow, binary computing. Today's' microchips think in one or zero, yes or no. Quantum chips would be able to think of one, zero, and every possible state in-between.

Their computing power will be effectively infinite. Ralph Merkle at Xerox' Palo Alto labs predicts he'll be using a computer 1000 times more powerful than the average office PC.

Ghost atoms might give scientists a tool for examining the heart of quarks without touching the real thing, and for accessing the fuzzy cloud. IBM's probes are not yet sensitive enough - the phantom is only 10 nanometres away from the original and that's about one-hundredth of one percent of the thickness of a human hair.

But quantum physicists are used to the small picture. Eigler's colleague Hari Manoharan is already talking about bonding real atoms to phantoms, creating molecules that he calls "half-ghosts". It's enough to send a shiver down my spine.

Mobile phones may be irritating, but deadly ? Uri Geller warns of the cellphone terrorist

Mobile phones, you know, they make me edgy. For one thing, I never finish half the sentences I start - so many people have my mobile number that I am interrupted almost every time I open my mouth, whether I'm speaking or eating.

For another, the microwaves might cause cancer. I always wear an earpiece to avoid frying my brain, but what happens to those waves when the phone is in my pocket ? Are they cooking my kidneys ?

On aeroplanes, there's a nagging awareness that the shifty guy with the DIY haircut two rows forward could be a terrorist. And he may have smuggled a mobile phone aboard.

Mobile phones on airliners can be deadly. When oil driller Neil Whitehouse scoffed and sent an "I love you" text message shortly after takeoff on a British Airways flight from Madrid to Manchester, he received a 12-month jail sentence. The jury heard Whitehouse was within 6 meters of 100 pieces of electronic equipment, with 15 radio systems close by. All were at risk of malfunction from his three little words on the mobile.

If a mobile phone could damage a jet, what could a highly-powered microwave weapon do ? Some conspiracy theorists believe TWA Flight 800 was accidentally downed in 1996 by a US military Electro-magnetic ray which was being tested too close to civilian flightpaths.

These weapons are being developed - that's no mere theory. And they are devastating against every kind of electronics, not just in planes. The technology was discovered as a side-effect of atomic bombs - the nuclear blast produced a massive Electro-magnetic (EM) pulse.

A knockout EM pulse can be built into an ordinary TNT or Semtex stick bomb, the kind favored by terrorists in car bomb attacks. The explosive is cased in aluminum, with a loop of wire at the far end of the stick from the fuse. When the bomb explodes, a wave of Electro-magnetic energy is forced up the pipe and into the wire. It discharges like lightning, looking for a conductor to hit - a conductor such as a computer network.

These weapons will be used in terror attacks on financial centers and media stations. The US is already thought to have targeted EM devices against Serbia.

The possibility is that one day, without warning, the computer you rely on will be friend by an EM pulse. Just stay positive - this will probably do you less physical harm than using your cell phone.