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Yep you heard it right. The good people at North Shore Ecology Center (3070 Dato, land Park, Ill. 60035) have mounted an auto generator on a stationary bicycle; hooked it to a 12-volt battery, and then' connected the whole system to a portable, low-wattage black and white TV set. Then, whenever you want to watch a show, just on the tube, climb aboard the bike, and start pumping. "You can actually watch the pounds roll off," say the folks at NSEC.

FEW STATES ARE (FINALLY PUTTING THEIR MONEY WHERE THEIR MOUTHS ARE when it comes to really supporting energy: Indiana, Colorado,, Maryland, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oregon, and South Dakota are now all offering property tax concessions to folks who install sun powered'systems in their homes or other buildings. Our hats are off to "The Big Eight" 'but our eyes are on the remaining forty two, who have yet to come to their solar senses.

SEVERE FIREWOOD SHORTAGE IS IMPOSING HARDSHIPS on an estimated 1.3 billion people all over the globe and We Worldwatch Institute, which has been monitoring the crisis, says the problem could become "the most profound ecological allenge of the late 20th century". Demand for the fuel has become so intense particularly in Third World countries, where as much as 90% of the population use wood for cooking and heating that vast tracts of land have been literally picked clean of every tree, root, stick, and twig and the resulting erosion is rendering thousands of acres of formerly fertile ground completely useless for food or timber production.

GASEOUS DIFFUSION the process that transforms uranium ore into fuel for power plants and bombs is also one of the biggest reasons why only a few nations have nuclear capabilities: The technique is complex, massive in scope, and wickedly expensive. Now, however, teams in Russia and the U.S. have developed a relatively simple, low cost method that uses laser beams to circumvent the entire gaseous diffusion rigmarole. So what? So any little country with raw uranium will be able to make its own 3 bomb ingredients. Bye bye nuclear club. Hello Brazil, Argentina, Korea, Uganda, South Africa, Israel. Farewell everybody?

AN INDICATION OF THIS COUNTRY'S CHANGING FRAME OF MIND might be found in the fact that Cape Canaveral best known as the launching site of U.S. space probes during the 60's and early 70's will soon become the home of a $1 million Solar Center funded by the state of Florida to coordinate research in and the development and demonstration of sun spawned energy. It would seem that science has (at last!) begun to temper its delusions of technological grandeur with the crying needs to be found right in our own backyard.

TORQUE FROM TINY TORNADOES? James Yen, a researcher at Grumman Aerospace Corporation, has come up with an idea for converting wind into a twister like vortex, which then spins a turbine. The system isn't based on airspeed as most wind generators are but on the fact that tornadoes derive most of their energy from the intensely low pressure areas at their cores. In Yen's design, air rushes past a rotor and into a cyclone chamber, where (according to the scientist) it produces far more power than it would by spinning a conventional windmill. The ingenious inventor feels a unit only 60 X 20 meters "big", with a 2 meterdiameter turbine, could generate 1 megawatt of electricity! An ordinary windplant would need a turbine 65 meters in diameter to do as well.

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