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Last Summer, Michael Arrington, the founder of the influential technology blog TechCrunch, wrote a post asking, "How many Silicon Valley start-up executives are hopped up on Provigil?" He was referring to the stimulant, which is the brand name for modafinil, that doctors normally prescribe to treat excessive drowsiness associated with narcolepsy and other sleep disorders. "[T]he buzz lately is that it's the 'entrepreneur's drug of choice' around Silicon Valley," the post said.

In an online poll in the British science journal Nature last year, answered by 1,400 people in 60 countries, 1 in 5 said they had used drugs for nonmedical reasons "to stimulate their focus, concentration, or memory." Only about half had a prescription for the drug they were using. A third had bought the drugs over the Internet. And even though about half reported unpleasant side effects, 4 out of 5 "thought that healthy adults should be able to take the drugs if they want to," Nature reported.

Philip Harvey is one who uses them. A professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University in Atlanta, he regularly flies from Georgia to Europe on business. To prepare for his flight, he takes modafinil. He uses the stimulant to feel alert and rested, despite lost sleep, allowing him to return to his family faster. He has no trouble getting a prescription from his doctor. "From Atlanta, I can get to Europe by 6 a.m. and give a 9 a.m. presentation," he says. "It lets you go and come back the same day, or go over one day and come back the next."

Green Grid reps stressed today that understanding and then defining energy efficiency has to come before any plans to increase it. Having metrics to measure energy efficiency at the level of an entire data center has been a longstanding problem in the business, and one that makes it difficult to do comparisons between facilities. The Green Grid wants to develop a common set of such measurements, or to build on the work of other groups where such metrics have already been developed.

Once that's done (hopefully by the third quarter of this year), the group will embark on an "efficiency baseline study" to see what sorts of practices data center managers are following now in regards to energy efficiency. Eventually, it will compile a database so that data center owners can see how their facilities compare to others in the business.

Anyone paying attention to recent technology headlines knows that buying servers is just one part of the total cost. It costs power to run them, and power to cool them, and power costs money. AMD has just sponsored a study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory staff scientist Jonathan Koomey that tries to answer the question: just how much power do US servers slurp down each year?

Koomey, who is also a consulting professor at Stanford, claims that his analysis is the most comprehensive to date and is based on the best available data from IDC. He concludes that in 2005, the total power consumption of US servers was 0.6 percent of overall US electricity consumption. When cooling equipment is added, that number doubles to 1.2 percent—the same amount used by color televisions.

Between 2000 and 2005, server electricity use grew at a rate of 14 percent each year, meaning that it more than doubled in five years. The 2005 estimate shows that servers and associated equipment burned through 5 million kW of power, which cost US businesses roughly $2.7 billion.

Koomey notes that this represents the output of five 1 GW power plants. Or, to put it another way, it's 25 percent more than the total possible output from the Chernobyl plant

Soljacic and his collaborators had demonstrated a new way of coaxing magnetic fields into transferring power over a distance of several meters without dispersing as electromagnetic waves. The demonstration ushered in a technology that might eventually become as pervasive as the gadgets it could power. Laptops, cell phones, iPods, and digital cameras might someday recharge without power cords. With the proliferation of wireless electronics, perhaps it was just a matter of time before power transmission would go wireless, too.

The device that Soljacic and his collaborators put together had a disarming simplicity. On one side of the room, hanging from the ceiling, was a ring-shaped electrical circuit, about half a meter across, plugged into the wall. Hanging adjacent to the circuit, but with no physical connection to it, was a slightly larger copper coil looking like an oversize mattress spring. A few meters away hung a similar system with an ordinary lightbulb attached to the circuit. When the physicists sent power through the first circuit, the bulb lit up.

As expected, some energy was lost on its way to the lightbulb. However, a surprising amount reached its destination, the team reports in the July 6 Science. "The efficiency was 40 percent at the biggest distance we probed [more than 2 meters]," Soljacic says. At shorter distances, the efficiency was much higher.

The coils of this demonstration device would be too big to fit inside a laptop, let alone a cell phone. But this was only the first and simplest of several prototypes that the physicists have in mind. More tests are to come. The MIT team and other physicists say that in principle they see no obstacle to making such devices more compact and more efficient.

Making no waves

The idea of transmitting energy wirelessly isn't new. For almost two centuries, scientists have known that rapidly changing magnetic fields, such as those produced by an alternating current flowing through a wire, can induce an electric current in another wire. That's how the coils inside power transformers transmit energy from one coil to another without touching. But this form of induction usually works efficiently only when the two coils are very close to each other.

In the early 1900s, long before the power grid made electricity widely available, electricity pioneer Nikola Tesla devised a grand scheme to transfer large amounts of power over long distances from a tower 20 stories tall, to be built on Long Island in New York. To this day, historians puzzle over how Tesla's system was supposed to work, or whether it could have worked at all, says Bernard Carlson, a historian of science at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville who is writing a biography of the great engineer. "We can't even begin to understand what he was doing with this power stuff," Carlson says.

The project died when Tesla's financial backers pulled the plug, possibly because Tesla seemed unclear as to how to bill customers receiving wireless power.

Just six months after taking office, Gov. Charlie Crist has leaped to the forefront of an issue his predecessors rarely mentioned: global warming.

His two-day summit on the issue last week drew 600 participants. He was written up in Time and interviewed on the CBS Early Show. Environmental groups sang his praises, and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called him "another great action hero."

How did the Republican governor suddenly become the Climate Change Crusader? He credits three people with spurring his involvement: St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Baker, Florida Wildlife Federation president Manley Fuller and former California Environmental Protection Agency chief Terry Tamminen.

They educated Crist on the issue and galvanized him to launch far-reaching changes in the state's energy policies: cutting power plant emissions, requiring the use of alternate fuels and rewriting the building code to require more energy efficiency. He also signed agreements with the United Kingdom and Germany to work together.

"It's really borne fruit," Fuller said. "He really took to this."

Crist's initiative is more sweeping than those of the dozen or so other governors who have tackled the issue.

"What is it different here in Florida is the level of action the governor has announced right off the bat," said Tom Peterson, executive director of the Center for Climate Strategies, a nonprofit group that works with states on warming.

Crist's participation in cutting greenhouse gases is crucial to saving the planet, Peterson said, because American states produce more greenhouse gases than many nations. They are "the big kids on the block," he said.

"And Florida," he said, "is one of the biggest."

Australia is hosting a three-day international meeting to discuss the impact of deforestation in the Asian region on global greenhouse gas emissions.

The government has put $200 million towards protecting forests from illegal logging.

But Greenpeace's Stephen Campbell says the Government should invest in renewable energy at home to cut greenhouse gasses rather than investing offshore.

So long as Congress is investigating issues over which it has the power to legislate, it can compel witnesses to appear and respond to questions. That power has been affirmed over and over in prosecutions for contempt.

In modern times, this congressional power has been enforced by referring contempt cases to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia for indictment and prosecution. That, of course, is the rub. It allows the president to exercise his plenary power under the Constitution to issue pardons "for offenses against the United States."

But no law says that indictment and prosecution by the Justice Department is the exclusive means to enforce congressional prerogative.

Indeed, in an 1895 case ( United States v. Chapman), the defendant unsuccessfully argued that Congress could not have such cases of contempt prosecuted through the courts but must punish such defiance on its own, without judicial assistance. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held that judicial enforcement of Congress's inherent power was optional.

This power of Congress to punish contemptuous behavior itself was reinforced in 1934. In Jurney v. McCracken, the Supreme Court denied a writ of habeas corpus to a petitioner who had been taken into custody by the Senate sergeant- at-arms for allegedly destroying documents requested in a Senate subpoena.

The limitation on the president's pardon power was most comprehensively discussed in a 1925 opinion by Chief Justice (and former president) William Howard Taft in the case of Ex Parte Grossman.

Grossman had been accused during Prohibition of the illegal sale of liquor and was enjoined by a federal court from further sale of alcoholic beverages. When he violated the order, he was accused of contempt and sentenced to prison -- and then pardoned by the president.

Despite the pardon, a federal judge in Chicago ordered him to jail on the theory that a charge of criminal contempt was not an "offense against the United States" because it was a judicial act, and a presidential pardon would violate the separation of powers.

In an analysis of the pardon power that Taft traced back through English parliamentary history, the opinion concluded that the power did reach contempts -- but only criminal contempts, the purpose of which is to vindicate offenses against the dignity of public authority.

The opinion distinguished civil contempt, whose purpose is to enforce a third party's rights by coercing compliance with a court order.

The distinction between criminal and civil contempt is well recognized. The punishment for criminal contempt is a set fine or jail term. A civil contempt punishment is framed in terms of either/or: either the defendant does X or suffers daily consequences until X is done. That concept is often explained by the aphorism that the defendant has the keys to the jail in his own pocket. He can free himself by obeying the court order. (The jailing of New York Times reporter Judith Miller for refusing to answer questions during the Scooter Libby investigation is a recent example.)

Thus, the congressional alternative. Instead of referring a contempt citation to the U.S. attorney, a house of Congress can order the sergeant-at-arms to take recalcitrant witnesses into custody and have them held until they agree to cooperate -- i.e., an order of civil contempt. Technically, the witness could be imprisoned somewhere in the bowels of the Capitol, but historically the sergeant-at-arms has turned defendants over to the custody of the warden of the D.C. jail.