Pennsylvania Man Claims He Made Fuel From Salt Water

This sounds a wee bit nutty, but an article in Sunday's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette tells the story of an Erie, Pennsylvania man who created a 3,000-degree flame by exposing salt water to radio frequencies.

The guy, according to the story, was trying to desalinate seawater with a generator "he developed to treat cancer," when he noticed a flash in the test tube.

Within days, he had the salt water in the test tube burning like a candle, as long as it was exposed to radio frequencies.

His discovery has spawned scientific interest in using the world's most abundant substance as clean fuel, among other uses.

Rustum Roy, a Penn State University (my alma mater!) chemist and expert in water structure, tells the Post-Gazette the guy is not just a nut bar. He says he recreated the phenomenon last week at the university's Materials Research Laboratory in State
College.

"It's true, it works," Dr. Roy said. "Everyone told me, 'Rustum, don't be fooled. He put electrodes in there.' "

But there are no electrodes and no gimmicks, he said.

Roy called Kanzius' discovery "the most remarkable in water science in 100 years."

I can't wait to see whether other researchers can replicate these results. If they could, it would blow away results cold fusion experiments have seen in terms of the amount of energy generated.