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Culture & politics

Not Guilty, Mate

Some of the most effective but least talked about anti-death penalty activists in the country are not even from this country. For 13 years, the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center, a New Orleans nonprofit that represents death row inmates, has brought dozens of British, Australian, and Canadian lawyers to the United States to help save the lives of prisoners in Louisiana and Mississippi, according to Legal Affairs (Nov./Dec. 2005). These advocates have helped overturn death sentences in all but 4 of the more than 300 cases they've handled. Louisiana prosecutors have been so frustrated by the foreign lawyers, writes Dana Mulhauser, that when they "detect a British accent, they are known to hang up the phone."

Energy from Undulations

For decades, engineers have tried to harness the immense power of waves, only to have their hopes dashed along with their equipment as storms destroyed their experimental generators. "People in the wave field looked from the start for efficiency; you have to start from survivability," says a spokesman with Ocean Power Delivery, a Scottish company that may have finally found the answer, reports Discover (Dec. 2005). OPD's 450-foot-long cherry-red sea snake -- dubbed Pelamis -- generates 11,000 volts from the rolling, up-and-down motion of the waves. The key is its segmented body, which allows it to undulate over swells up to 10 times the size and 100 times the power of average waves.

Paper-Thick Walls

Americans throw away enough paper each year to build a 48-foot wall surrounding the country, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Maybe they're onto something. Paper, it turns out, makes an excellent ingredient in building materials, writes Joshua M. Bernstein in Plenty (Dec. 2005/Jan. 2006). Just add water, cement, sand, or clay to a pile of old newspapers or phone books and stir. The resulting stew, known as papercrete, can be poured into molds and dried into building blocks that are lightweight, fire-resistant, and superstrong. About 50 papercrete structures have been built around the country, mostly in the Southwest, where the hot, dry weather counteracts one of the material's potential drawbacks: It absorbs moisture.

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