Would you like to make a billion dollars and save the planet?

K.R. Sridhar is a NASA scientist who was working on a project to terraform Mars. He invented a machine that would produce oxygen in the Martian atmosphere and make the Red Planet habitable for humans.

But the budget got cut. The program got cancelled. So K.R. Sridhar took the invention and reversed it to suck in oxygen. He created an entirely new kind of fuel cell, which is far more compact and more efficient than anything now producing electricity. It is designed to replace the grid.

A single block the size of a brick can power a European home. Two small blocks about the size of bricks can power the average American home. Or four Asian homes. Or six Indian homes. Power lines – gone. Electrical stations – gone. Combustion and emissions – gone. Oxygen + fuel combine upon a ceramic tile painted with chemical inks. A chemical reaction produces an electrical charge. A small substation can power an office block – and then some.

It is being funded to the tune of $100 million by the same venture capitalist who helped found Netscape, Amazon and Google. The project, under development for 10 years, has been extremely secretive precisely because any leak would threaten the untold riches and public good that will come from it. The aim is not to undermine energy companies and public utilities but to allow them to buy these fuel cells and replace the grid.

He has customers for the invention. Twenty companies in California are quietly testing the device. Walmart is on board. FedEx powers their Oakland, CA hub on the Bloom Box. They’re the company whose slogan is “If it absolutely, positively has to be there on time.” Each unit costs $700-$800,000. One reason Californian companies have have signed on to the idea is that the State of California subsidizes the purchase by 20% and the Federal government provides a 30% tax break for energy efficiency. Ebay runs their campus on this stuff and says, averaged out over the week, it provides five times as much energy as they use, and saved $100,000 in energy costs over the first nine months.

However Colin Powell has seen it and says it works. This does not exactly constitute a confident endorsement, considering Iraq and all that. Although if Powell surely does not want to be seen negatively in the light of history, he probably is trying very hard to back a winner in order to re-establish his integrity and his legacy. So he is on of the Board of Directors.

It should be noted that the financial backer of the Bloom Box, Netscape, Amazon and Google also backed the Segway. It should also be noted that the Bloom Box is made by a NASA scientist. NASA scientists are regularly required to build impossible things that work. Both FedEx and Ebay depend upon dependable energy or else their businesses fail.

In five to ten years, it should be available for every home at $3,000 apiece. That seems like a slight fudge to me. Most likely they are trying to terrify the energy and utility companies to purchase Bloom Boxes now and continue to supply the energy needs of the country or, in 5-10 years, face the threat that they will be wiped out as cleanly as the mainstream media by the rapid advances in digital technology. If I were them, I would take that threat very seriously.

It’s important to note that The Bloom Box makes most of Congress’s political posturing moot. The Bloom Box is the result of both big government (NASA), an immigrant work force (K.R. Sridhar is Indian), private investment, and enthusiastic adoption by companies whose profits increase with efficient energy. It is facilitated by both state and Federal governments collaborating to produce tax incentives to further the United States in the direction it is profitable to move, in the direction it is morally obligated to move, in the direction it needs to move for the Planet Earth to survive and thrive under the aegis of the Indispensible Nation, the United States of America.

So here’s what we should do. Green activists and industry lobbyists should persuade both state and federal governments to legislate progressive tax deductions for investment, purchase or adoption of energy-efficient practices – from 20% to 30%, based upon an energy-efficiency rating. Private investors should invest in the Bloom Box and in companies which use the Bloom Box. The press should write about the Bloom Box and bloggers should blog the Bloom Box. The White House should have a Bloom Box on the lawn and another in the basement.

And we all become billionaires.

Now, I don’t know if this is really the Holy Grail. But all of what I’ve just said above is perfectly reasonable. And if you don’t believe me, hey – I’m only telling you what I read and saw on CBS News/60 Minutes.

Yippee-ah-kayay. How about that, America?
Let’s roll.

•••

Can I say just one more thing? In 2007 I started an online magazine of arts and ideas as an experiment. I wanted to call it something but my partners wanted to call it something else and besides, my web designer’s band in high school was the same damn name, so we dropped it. So we called it The Boy Bedlam Review.

I just watched the 60 Minutes extra, in which Leslie Stahl talks to K.R. Sridhar about the naming of Bloom Energy. K.R. describes a funny little story in which his 9-year-old son kept suggesting one word: BLOOM.

And it occurred to me that I originally wanted to call my magazine BLOOM! after Leopold Bloom who in James Joyce’s Ulysses is the stand-in for Homer’s Odysseus who comes home after a 10-year-war and a 10-year odyssey. Yes. I wanted to call it BLOOM! and the Boy Bedlam Review. How can I prove that? Well, it’s right here in our About Us page.

Funny how things happen that way.

~ David A. Schneider

Vienna Teng lives in New York City. She has five albums out.

(NANCY) LEE HIXSON of Danville, Ohio died at sunrise on June 30, 2009. She was born Nancy Lee Wood in Cleveland on April 17, 1944, baptised at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, Valley City Ohio, and confirmed at St. John’s Lutheran Church, Independence Ohio. In addition to being a teetotaling mother and an indifferent housekeeper, she was a board certified naturopath specializing in poisonous and medicinal plants; but she would like to point out, posthumously, that although it did occur to her, she never spiked anyone’s tea. She often volunteered as an ombudsman to help disadvantaged teens find college funding and early opened her home to many children of poverty, raising several of them to successful, if unwilling, adulthood. She also enjoyed a long life of unmentionable adventures and confessed she had been a rebellious teen-aged library clerk, an untalented college student on scholarship, a run-away Hippie, a stoic Sunday School teacher, a Brownie leader, a Grange lecturer, an expert rifleman, a waitress, a wife once or twice, a welder, an artist, and a writer. She was in earlier years the president of Rainbow Systems Trucking Company, Peninsula Ohio, and she drove tractor-trailers over-the-road hauling freight commodities to startled customers from Minnesota to Florida. She was the CEO of the Cuyahoga Valley Center of Outdoor Leadership Training (COLT), where she lived in a remote and tiny one-room cabin in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Despite the lack of cabin space and dining table, she often served holiday dinners to friends and relatives and could seat twenty at the bed. She lived the last twenty-three years at Winter Spring Farm near Danville where she built a private Stonehenge, and planted and helped save from extinction nearly 50 varieties of antique apple trees, many listed in A.J. Downing’s famous orchard guide of 1859 – among them such delicacies as Summer Sweet Pearmain, Sops of Wine, Westfield Seek No Further, and Duchess of Oldenburg. Her homemade cider and wine were reputed to cause sudden stupor. She befriended countless stray dogs, cats, horses, and the occasional goat. She was a nemesis to hunters, and an activist of unpopular, but just, causes. In short, she did all things enthusiastically, but nothing well. After moving to Danville, she bravely suffered with a severe and disabling disorder and a ten-year battle with lymphoma that ultimately took her life. She was often confined to the home where she continued to tirelessly volunteer and donate her limited resources to needy teens in the area, always cheered by their small and large achievements. Sympathy and big donations may be extended at this time. She was predeceased by her father Dwight Edward Wood of the Ohio pioneer Wood family of Byhalia, who died in the Columbus Jail having been accused of a dreadful crime, and by her second father Ted A. Cznadel of Danville who adopted her, loved her and raised her despite it all. She is survived by her dearly beloved son, her heart and soul and every breath, Christopher Daniel Hixson of Akron, (a sterling citizen who rose above his murky childhood with a scandalous mother), and by his loving partner Mitchell Kahan. She is also survived by her mother, the opinionated and stubborn Ann Gall Cznadel; by her brother the Rev. Dr. Thomas R. Sluberski, a Lutheran minister and professor, most recently of Rio de Janeiro; by her gentle, ecological brother Gregory T. Cznadel, a quality manager of Cleveland; by her talented sister Linda R. Cznadel Hauck, a librarian from sea to shining sea, of San Luis Obispo; by her genius nephew and godson Matthew Hauck of Minneapolis; and the other half of her heart, her patient friend and backstairs lover of thirty years, David Paul Bleifus who resides at the farm. Ms. Hixson traced her lineage directly through eleven generations to Governor William Bradford of the ship Mayflower and the Plimouth Colony, and was in the process of membership to The Mayflower Society. She was a long-time card carrying member of the ACLU, the Democratic Party, and of MENSA. The family wishes to thank Dr. Gene Morris for his care, understanding and sense of humor through it all; Dr. Paul Masci of Cleveland Clinic Wooster; and Dr. Skip Radwany and the nursing staff of the Palliative Care Center at Summa for their compassion as Lee shuffled off this mortal coil. Cremation has taken place. Immediate family and friends will gather at Stonehenge on a sunny summer day to celebrate her life. Interment is in the family plot at Brinkhaven Hilltop Cemetery in Brinkhaven, Ohio, where she will await an eventual and probable slide down the cliff to the Mohican River below. In lieu of flowers, please pray for the Constitution of the United States. “Now Voyager depart, (much, much for thee is yet in store)…” – Walt Whitman www.fischerfuneralhome.com

The American Heart Association has this helpful hint: if someone suffers a heart attack, perform CPR to the rhythm of – that’s right – The Bee Gee’s “Stayin’ Alive.” And you know what? It works.

Debra Bader was taking a walk in the woods with her 56-year-old husband when he suddenly collapsed. She started singing “Stayin’ Alive,” and thumped on his chest to the beat (in rigorously-approved CPR fashion, of course), for 15 minutes until the paramedics arrived.

And you know what? He lived. 95% of people in the same position don’t. Read more in CNN Health.

The first version of the “You’ve Got Talent” tv series franchise debuted in America in 2006. It spawned versions in over 20 different countries. The latest, “Ukraine’s Got Talent,” just premiered in April, 2009.

On “Ukraine’s Got Talent,” Kseniya Simonova, a 24-year-old sand artist, was awarded First Prize for her composition “1945.” There is virtually no information on Simonova currently available in English. But she performs the painting as a great classical pianist or conductor would; the art itself has Marc Chagall’s ghost running through it.