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Lessons Learned After Worst Industrial Accident In History Of India; Darwins Theories Spark New Controversy In Schools; TiVo To Begin Putting Ads On Screen
Aired December 4, 2004 - 15:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
DANIEL SIEBERG, CNN ANCHOR: Hi, I'm Daniel Sieberg. Today on NEXT@CNN it's been 20 years since the worst industrial accident took thousands of people in India. We'll look at the lessons learned and not learned.
TV viewers who hate commercials love TiVo, but how will you feel when the digital video recorder starts putting even more ads on their TV screens?
And nearly 150 years after Darwin published the case for revolution, the concept creates new controversy in schools across the country. All that and more on NEXT.
Twenty years ago this week, a gas leak occurred at an union carbide fertilizer plant in India. More than 20,000 people died. Thousands more are still suffering. As Satinder Bindra reports, many feel that few lessons have been learned from the tragedy.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
SATINDER BINDRA, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): Twenty years, paints the pain of struggle and demand for justice. Since 1984, the population has tripled. One million people now live here. The town has grown. But few have forgotten this is where the world's worst industrial accident happened. Memorials dot the city's landscape, it seems the city can never move on. the morning of December 3rd, 1984, tons of the highly toxic metalized osinyde (ph) gas leaked from a fertilizer plant the gas spread quickly.
Within moments, tens of thousands of people were gasping and screaming for air. It is estimated within the first 24 hours alone, some 3,000 people were killed. Many are buried here. Three or four to a grave. Hospitals could barely cope with the survivors. In the months that followed, thousands more perished. The tragedy ultimately claiming more than 20,000 lives. More than 500,000 survivors, about half the population, still feel a similar sense of helplessness. They crowd into hospitals. Too old to work and plagued by nervous disorders, these victims have almost given up on life.
But supporting them, caring for them and providing regular counseling is another victim herself. Rashida Bee. Bee tells me six members of her family including her father were killed by the after effects of the gas.
RASHIDA BEE, SURVIVOR (translator): Today, the situation of Bohal (ph) is even more grave than it was that night. Those who died because of the gas were very fortunate. The unfortunate are still living. They're like the living dead.
BINDRA: 21-year-old Ansar Amed (ph) was just a few months old when he inhaled the gas. Five years ago, he stopped walking and talking and now is completely dependent on his mother for care.
JABEEN KAUSAR, MOTHER OF THE VICTIM (translator): I can't say what I feel. I feel that God should take me away right now. Either make my son all right or just kill us all.
BINDRA: But killing is still continuing warn environmentalists pointing to this plant that still hasn't been cleaned up. As I walk through I notice tons of poisonous chemicals everywhere. Soil samples taken from here show toxic materials have leached underground contaminating the water supply. The local government now trucks in water for residents.
But people are still using polluted water for their household chores and some even admit drinking it. When clean water finishes, we drink this water, says this woman. Environmental groups say it will cost about $30 million to clean up this plant. But union carbide says it has no further liability after it paid victims of $470 million out of court settlement in 1989. The company also says what happened here was no accident but a deliberate act of sabotage.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There is no question in the mind of union carbide that a disgruntled employee who introduced a large amount of water into the tank of methal licesiniade (ph) was responsible for causing the run away reaction.
BINDRA: A claim that many including the Indian government says is irrelevant. The local government now says it will remove all this hazardous waste. Environmentalists complain it's already too late. They say thousands of children are now being born with birth defects.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Something that poisoned and killed so many people continues to poison lives and nobody seems to care is the biggest tragedy.
BINDRA: As she puts the posters informing victims where to get the last batch of compensation, Bee feels they haven't learned lessons from (INAUDIBLE).
BEE (translator): Slowly, the world is moving towards death and in the world every day, somewhere, Bohal (ph) gets repeated. In a small way, but Bohal (ph) is repeated.
BINDRA: Victims (INAUDIBLE) family says the best deterrence for other corporations that pollute the earth is to punish union carbide executives. India has asked the U.S. to extradite the then union carbide head Warren Anderson to stand trial in India. But the United States has turned down that request fueling great resentment here.
Rashid Bee says she will fight to her last breath to bring Anderson to justice. Bee and millions of Bohal (ph) half a million victims feel large companies need to be constantly confronted to keep them from using poorer parts of the world as a laboratory.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
SIEBERG: Well a new study on another environmental disaster this. One is the deadly heat wave that swept Europe in August a year ago. Mari Ramos (ph) has that story.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
MARI RAMOS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): Europe's hot summer of 2003 ignited heated debates over the last year as everyone searched for answers to explain the killer season. Officials believe inadequate infrastructure, scientists sited record temperatures. And the public felt that poor planning lead to the deaths of thousands across the continent.
But a recent study published in the journal "Nature" sheds new light on the topic and questions whether man made pollutants like cold fire plants, auto emission and other green house gases helped to spark the sizzling summer temperatures that topped 110.
MYLES ALLEN, OXFORD UNIVERSITY: What we found was that past green house gas emissions, past human influence on climate increased the risk of a heat wave by at least a factor of 2. Probably more like a facture of 4.
RAMOS (ph): Authors of the report say their conclusion support the findings of meeting climate change models but their study goes one step further by showing a link between green house gas emissions and the specific weather related disaster. They compared European atmospheric records and other studies that spanned a 150 to 400-year period. From that, they developed a model that looked at both the influence of green house gases on the record temperatures and what the European climates would have been last summer if human activities were not a factor.
Their findings indicate 2003 was the hottest European summer in more than 400 years. The study not only warns man-made pollution contributed largely to this natural disaster, it more than doubles the risk that heat waves like this will happen again.
ALLEN: What we see is that by the middle of the century, 2003 would actually be a normal summer. By the end of the century, 2003 would be an exceptionally cold summer. So that puts the whole change in context.
RAMOS (ph): Beyond the science, researchers say their findings have legal and economic applications. Draughts during the heat wave cost billions in crop losses and electricity prices soared. Alpine ice melted and forest fires burned through more than a billion dollars in Portugal alone. The researchers say that in time studies like theirs could help governments, businesses and the public recoup some of the losses from global warming. By identifying all the factors that contributed to a weather-related disaster and making the primary polluters pay their share of the cost of climate change.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
SIEBERG: All right moving on now to a mysterious stranding of whales and dolphins in Austria and New Zealand this week. In Australia, authorities and volunteers worked to save dozens of pilot whales and bottle nosed dolphins which beached themselves on two different islands. Some 100 died. But a few dozen others were saved. Across the Tazman Sea in New Zealand, dozens more of the marine mammals swam ashore and died. As most strandings, authorities aren't sure why the animals beached themselves. Some say the fact that this happened at the same time in two separate countries is probably just a coincidence.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Next up, a device that lets you take your TV connection with you wherever you go.
And later, art, that's a snap snot of American mass consumption.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SIEBERG: Television is often referred to one of the truly wireless technologies out there but the television that we are talking about in this case takes wireless technology even more wireless if that's possible. Joining us now is Mark Saltzman he is our gadget expert.
MARK SALTZMAN: Hi Daniel.
SIEBERG: Mark I can't help but notice you're carrying a TV around with you.
SALTZMAN: I am. And it is wireless but there is no rabbit ears as you can see in fact we are watching live CNN right now and you can see behind me there's a big screen, as well. We are talking about location free TV. It is the name of this product from Sony, it is a new technology that really does bring wireless into the 21st century.
Here's what I mean by that, there's two really cool things. The first is that you get a bay station or router, if you will. So when you plug your TV connection into this base station in your home, you can then within 50 feet in the house or backyard enjoy TV wirelessly or watch it in your kitchen often we don't cable input there so you can put that at the battery backs up as a little stand and you can watch TV wireless.
SIEBERG: Not unlike a cordless phone?
SALTZMAN: That's right. It's a different frequency so it doesn't interrupt with that.
SIEBERG: Same idea.
SALTZMAN: Yes it is like a Wi fi set up.
SIEBERG: I have seen this before. The wireless TV.
SALTZMAN: That part isn't unique. You are absolutely right Sharp came out with a product called the wireless acuos (ph) in the summer of 2004 and did basically that. It was not as fast so there was a video hiccup or stutter in the system. What is really cool about this product is that you can now watch your local TV anywhere in the world.
So here's how that works. Not only do you plug your TV content in the back of the base station, coming out of the back of your satellite receiver or your cable but you also plug in your Ethernet. So by logging on to the net wirelessly, you can be in a cafe in Tokyo enjoying a cup of coffee and you turn this on wirelessly and you can then look at all your local TV by going into a pass word protected site, so you are actually communicating with the base station over broadband.
SIEBERG: So this is you hub, this stays at your house and this is like a spoke and you're off in the world traveling around and whatever is routed through this you can see while you're on the road.
SALTZMAN: That is right. Not only can you connect TV but you can connect a DVD player. Lets says you have a five-disk changer, five different movies in there, you can watch that on this touch screen TV. You can connect a camcorder, a VCR you name it and you can access that anywhere in the world.
SIEBERG: And even digital pictures on the computer?
SALTZMAN: Yes, in fact I can show you here. You can also store some photos on here. Now there isn't a hard drive, this is a TV not a table computer. But it does have enough memory to store some high resolution photos and you can see the picture quality looks quite good. There's a shot here. There's an ability to surf the Web so along with TV, you just click on the Web button and here's CNN.com and picture in picture showing what's live on TV as well and you can also write e-mails with the stylus pen that is on the top here or your finger and doodle have that sent as an email. There's also a soft key board as well. It is thin enough to slide behind your lap top so it probably can even fit in your case and there is also a little handle as well. So not so bad.
SIEBERG: This is the larger size, there is a smaller one, as well.
SALTZMAN: That is right. This is 12.1 inches and there is also a 7 inch. The 7 inch model is $1,100. And this model here is $1,500. Little bit steep for that size TV but it does have that wireless connectivity.
SIEBERG: Other than the price, which might be prohibited to some people, are there any draw backs associated with this?
SALTZMAN: I would say there is two shortcomings. One is that if you want to enjoy that local continent any where in the world, you have to plug both a high speed connection from your cable modem or DSL connection and your TV connection in the box but we don't have that in the same room. Most people have the pc in the den and then the cable's in the living room so that's a draw back. Also battery life could be better, it is about two and half hours maybe three at most. About enough for a movie and a little bit more but of course there's the ability to plug it into the wall, too.
SIEBERG: All right no smoke, no mirrors, no wires. Thank you so much Robert Saltzman.
SALTZMAN: Thanks Dan.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Coming up, Tivo usually the bane of advertisers makes a move to become an ad man's friend.
And later, the U.S. military looks as a transportation method faster than jets. Think "Star Trek."
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SIEBERG: You ever think about what happens to discarded stuff after the garbage truck hauls it off? Well Seattle photographer Chris Jordan does and he has created some compelling pictures that document our throw away society. CNN cameraman Greg Canes and a producer Amanada Townsend (ph) show us Jordan's take on trash.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CHRIS JORDAN, SEATTLE PHOTOGRAPHER: Day-to-day, we make consumer decisions that feel light to us as individuals but we never get to see the aggregate and so I'm trying to find places where you can see the cumulative result of all of our consumption and these places are actually the infrastructure of our consumption where you see hundreds of thousands of shipping containers. Mount Rannier is usually photographed with beautiful blue skies and rivers and meadows and that kind of thing. In this case, the lower half of the image is now industrialized. And this is almost like a new horizon. I use a 8 by 10 view camera which is considered by most people to be a sort of antique way of photographing.
It is made to be used in a studio and I lug it out and around I in the field. I'm fascinated by pattern. And one of the things that pattern conveys is scale like a thousand shipping containers in a row is not only visually interesting and beautiful but that conveys the scale of our consumption.
To me, evidence of our mass consumption means vast piles of garbage, crushed cars, shredded scrapped steel. Container ports. Rail yards. Places where the scale of our consumption is readily visible. These look like apartment buildings to me.
And where I took this image was in a wine distributor. So all of these pallets are used to distribute wine that comes from overseas on containers and gets sent out all over the country. This is just an impossibly huge mountain of saw dust outside a lumber mill down in Tacoma. It's so huge it has the features of a mountain. See the strata in here? And these sort of erosional features. And this is just saw dust. Think how many trees just went into this saw dust pile. Consumption is not something we can see every day. It's not an easy thing to find visible evidence of how much stuff we use. This is the first image I made in my consumerism series. To me, this color reminded me of a Monet painting when I saw it from a ways back. The more I looked at it the more I realized I had made this kind of portrait of America because you can read all of the labels on the cans and there are products in there that I use.
There's a facility down in Tacoma where they collect cars from five states around and shred them and I saw this barge moving up the waterway and the weight of the cars is so much that it actually crushes them into sort of a strata that makes them look like layers in the Grand Canyon. It isn't the kind of beauty that people generally think of. But to me there is a beauty in honesty and what I'm trying to do is to look honestly at our world.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Coming up next half hour, an anti-evolution revolution with more than half of the people in a recent survey saying people were created, not evolved. We will look at the implications for teaching science.
Also ahead, how not to get hooked in a fishing scam.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SIEBERG: Welcome back to NEXT@CNN. Seventeen years ago, the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana law that would have forced public schools to teach creationism along side evolution. You think that ended the argument? Not a chance. Tom Foreman reports on the ongoing debate.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): More than half of Americans questioned in a recent CBS News/"New York Times" poll said human beings were created by God, created just as they are today. So those Americans think biblical creation should be taught right alongside evolution.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's a good possibility that both science and -- and the faith can coexist and in fact they're both right.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I do think that it's -- I think everything should be taught about both. But, being the age I am, I still lean toward creation more.
FOREMAN: Within the past year, 24 states have gone through public debate about teaching evolution. In Georgia, some textbooks now carry stickers saying evolution is just a theory. In Pennsylvania, some teachers are teaching an alternative to evolution.
WALT BROWN, FORMER EVOLUTIONIST: I am saying it is a terribly flawed theory. FOREMAN: And Walt Brown, who was once an evolutionist himself, is pleased. For years, he and others have argued that fossil records, the Earth's geology, even astrological events, simply provide too much evidence that something else is at work.
BROWN: Creationists wanted to see all the scientific evidence taught at the appropriate grade levels, that there's a ton of evidence that opposes evolution and supports creation and it's just being censored.
FOREMAN: Two words have come up a lot these days, are "intelligent design." Supporters of this idea do not talk about God, or the Bible, but instead, say some things are so complex, nature alone cannot explain them.
(on camera): The scientific community often dismisses such attacks on evolution as the result of runaway ignorance or religious zeal masquerading as scientific skepticism. Evolution, they say, is a theory but a very sound one.
(voice-over): Still, some who study religion, evolution, and science, suggest the fundamental problem is that faith can never prove the existence of God, and science can never prove God's absence.
JIM MILLER, ASSOCIATION FOR ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE: Creation is a term that's appropriate community of use is the religious community. It's a term that refers to convictions that are held within the religious community that may or may not have any bearing on science.
FOREMAN: But increasingly, it seems, creation is a term that may have a bearing on how science is taught.
(END VIDEO TAPE)
SIEBERG: Well, the creation or evolution of the digital video recorder was welcomed by many TV viewers. And one of the reasons people love their TiVos and other DVRs is that they make it so easy to skip the commercials, but the love affair may be about to run into trouble. Aaron Brown reports.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
AARON BROWN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It's an impish symbol that's synonymous with a television revolution.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh, I love TiVo. TiVo's great. TiVo has changed my life. I mean, as my wife and I, we were totally inept as VCR-users.
BROWN: Faster than you can say "program for unattended recording," TiVo radicalized television viewing by giving subscribers the ability to pause and then resume live TV, the power to zip through commercials on fast-forward, and the option of digitally recording hours of TV shows that can be watched later, making prime time any time. BROWN: TiVo became a phenomenon in just five years. But it's still not profitable, and it faces fierce competition from other providers of digital video technology, or DVRs. So, TiVo's recent announcement that it will allow pop-up-like ads in March seems a shift in TiVo's identity.
ROBERT THOMPSON, SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY: The idea that advertising and TiVo would climb into bed together I think makes a lot of people nervous, because a lot of people like TiVo because of the ease with which it allowed them to annihilate advertising.
BROWN: But consumers' ability to bypass TV ads has huge implications for the future of free television, which depends on ad revenues to pay the bills.
TIMOTHY HANLON, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, STARCOM MEDIAVEST GROUP: The television industry is basically in the beginning stages of a nervous breakdown. I think advertisers who use television and have historically liked television for its emotive appeal are finding that it's a much more difficult enterprise in the face of such technologies like TiVo and DVR.
STUART ELLIOTT, "THE NEW YORK TIMES": The effort has to be in the future to try to bring people in and get them to opt in to want to see the ad.
BROWN: The new TiVo ads will be pop-up-like billboards that appear during commercial pause. The goal is to entice viewers to opt in to watching longer ads. But TiVo's CEO insists this is only a subtle shift and one that has been overplayed by the media.
MIKE RAMSAY, CEO, TIVO: We have real some rules of the game that we want to play by that we're sticking to religiously on behalf of our customers. And we're going to stick to them. You know? And, yes, there will be new capabilities. People will see new forms of user interface. All that will evolve over time, but the rules will stay the same.
HANLON: It takes TiVo to profitablitity, and that's a good thing for everyone, in the long run.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You pay for that extra right to be able to like skip ads and that sort of thing and for the fact that they're just adding it just like defeats the point.
BROWN: What is clear is that TiVo is taking all of us into TV's future.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
SIEBERG: For more on TiVo's plans and the info on some of the other stories in our show, just check out our website, that's at cnn.com/next.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) ANNOUNCER: Just ahead, why you might want to think twice when getting an e-mail from the Internet service provider, your bank, or anyone you usually trust with your money.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SIEBERG: With the holiday gift season upon us, you're no doubt getting more e-mail shopping offers, but you should never click on a web link on an unsolicited e-mail; you might be hooked in one of the latest web scams.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
SUSANNA TROTTER, VICTIM OF COMPUTER SCAM: I don't have high speed.
ANNOUNCER: Welcome. You've got mail.
SIEBERG (voice-over): Susanna Trotter of Richmond, Virginia, bought her first computer in 1999. Within three months, her credit card number was stolen.
TROTTER: I got an e-mail from AOL saying that they needed to check my billing.
SIEBERG: Though it looked real, it was not from AOL, A corporate sister of CNN, by the way, it was from an online con artist. And when Susanna clicked on the click inside the e-mail, it directed to her what appeared to be a customer service page complete with legitimate links, logos, and the right language. It even had drop down menus to select her choice of credit card. She was being duped by a very clever identity thief.
TROTTER: Well, the first noticed was on the credit card, that there was a charge that I didn't recognize.
SIEBERG: The thief used the stolen credit card number to purchase lewd content online.
TROTTER: I called and it was a company out in California and after much cajoling, I got the girl to tell me that it was an adult entertainment site and I knew I hadn't signed up for that.
SIEBERG (on camera): The Company, of course, was tricked, too. It had nothing to do with the Trotter's stolen credit card information. The scheme is called "phishing," spelled with a "ph" not an "f." And scammers cast wide nets in the form of mass e-mails hoping to reel in unsuspected victims who think the message is legitimate. Sometimes, however, the tactics backfire and they hook the wrong guy.
(voice-over): An FBI agent in the Norfolk field office received the same phony AOL message as Susanna. His name is Joe Euhaus (PH), but we can't show you his face for investigative reasons. JOE EUHAUS, FBI AGENT: I think there is some sort of irony in the fact that they were sending the e-mail messages out in such abundance and just so happened I had to get one and one of the things that I specialize in is cyber crime, so I think there is some sort of poetic justice.
SIEBERG: The phishers had hooked an FBI agent, and he had the means to track them down. Helen Carr and George Patterson are now serving time in federal prison. Their lure of choice was AOL, but other common phishing e-mails purport to be from eBay, PayPal, Citibank, and U.S. Bank among others.
EILEEN HARRINGTON, ITC BUR. OF CONSUMER PROTECTION: Phishers send out huge volumes of e-mail to people who may or may not have accounts with the companies that they pretend to be, on the theory that these companies do so much business that some of the people who receive these e-mails are bound to have accounts or have done business with them and will bite.
SIEBERG: According to one study, 57 million U.S. adults believe they've received a phishing attack e-mail. It's estimated that 11 million of those people actually clicked on the e-mail's links to the fake websites. And the trend is on the rise. According to the Anti- Phishing Working Group, with a 52 percent average monthly rate through June 2004. The Federal Trade Commission operates the largest consumer complaint databases in North America. Eileen Harrington says phishing is becoming a huge problem, but it's a crime that's completely preventable.
HARRINGTON: Do not ever provide account information, a pin, a social security number, any kind of personally identifiable information like that in response to an e-mail, even if you think it's from a legitimate and reputable company, because that's not the way that these companies do business.
SIEBERG: Susanna was able to reverse the charges on her credit card, but was rattled by the whole experience.
TROTTER: I had felt like I was safe. I didn't know enough to realize I wasn't safe. And sure, ever since that happened, I'm very, very careful.
SIEBERG: On the Internet, seeing is not believing. The logos, language, and look of anything online are very easy to copy. If you think your billing records need updating, don't take the e-mail's word for it, contact the company independently and directly yourself.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
SIEBERG: All right. Now it's time to dip into the NEXT@CNN e- mail bag and last week we told you how a Scottish company is marketing a game that lets players recreate the assignation of President John F. Kennedy. Well, George Ellington, Connecticut, didn't think much of that idea. He writes with a suggestion for the U.K. game makers:
"...it would be wonderful if they could come up with a game involving Princess Di. Just think of the possibilities. We could have a choice of the number of paparazzi in pursuit, be able to select the blood-alcohol level of the driver...and even have a prize for the person who kills her the quickest. Wouldn't that be bloody fun!"
You know, George. I'm picking up on your sarcasm. I couldn't have said it better myself.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ANNOUNCER: Coming up next, complaints about airport security measures getting a little too personal.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SIEBERG: We're all in favor of security measures that could keep weapons or explosives off airplanes, right? Well, what if it involves an airport screener patting you in intimate places in front of a crowd of strangers? Kimberly Osias reports on pat-down procedures.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
KIMBERLY OSIAS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It's done in the name of security, but New York attorney Rhonda Gayner says she felt violated on a recent trip through the Tampa Airport. A female screener patted her down under her armpit and touched her with an open hand between her breasts.
RHONDA GAYNER, FLYER: And I was like, "Whoa! What are you doing? You can't do that." And the supervisor who I had been objecting to was standing right there, and he said, "Yes, we can."
OSIAS: Gayner says she felt like a common criminal when she was intimately patted down in full public view.
GAYNER: I've had the wand thing done before -- you know, they glide it over you, but this time, anytime -- you know, they -- the wand beeped, they touched me in that spot.
OSIAS: She's hired an attorney and is considering filing a class-action lawsuit. She believes the violation is endemic and underreported, because women feel intimidated. The American Civil Liberties Union agrees, and says they've received a growing number of complaints.
JAY STANLEY, ACLU: What we have here is a big problem. We have a security measure that's spun out of control, because there aren't proper protections being put in place to protect against that human element.
OSIAS: After two Chechen women smuggled explosives onto Russian planes, the TSA put a new policy in place, calling for more frequent pat-down searches. Screeners now have more latitude and leverage. Based on their visual observation alone, an individual can be searched even if a detector never sounds. TOM WILKINS, TSA LAGUARDIA AIRPORT: The one thing that we try to do is make the process as painless as possible for the traveling public so that we try not to be too intrusive into people's personal business, so we have to be careful in balancing that.
OSIAS (on camera): TSA does have a protocol in place. Screeners are only supposed to use the backs of their hands when conducting searches on sensitive areas. And as far as grievances are concerned, you can lodge a complaint in writing or ask to speak to a supervisor. The problem is when you're up against the clock in a stressful airport situation; some people don't want to do that.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
SIEBERG: Well, wouldn't it be great if you could get to a far away city without having to deal with airport screeners, long lines, and airline food? Well, if a research program funded by the Pentagon pans out, the future may bring some amazing new forms of transportation. Barbara Starr reports.
(BEGIN VIDEO TAPE)
(VIDEO CLIP FROM "STAR TREK," COURTESY PARAMOUNT STUDIOS)
BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): On the starship Enterprise, all Captain Kirk and his "Star Trek" crew have to do is signal Scotty the engineer to beam them up with the pull of a lever.
LEONARD NIMOY, ACTOR: Energize.
STARR: Instantly, they are transported to distant planets. Could the rest of us ever do that? The U.S. military wants to know. The Air Force, home of the most high- tech fighters and center of UFO speculation, is exploring strange new worlds and going where the Pentagon has not gone before. The Air Force gave Warp Drive Metrics of Las Vegas, Nevada $25,000 to study the physics of teleportation -- yes, the transport of persons or inanimate objects across space.
But the Air Force isn't snickering and even insists in a statement, "We don't do science fiction. We do science." Adding that, "many current weapons started as ideas perceived to be science fiction, such as airplanes, lasers, and stealth technology." And although the Air Force says it's not going to spend any more money on the project, some physicists are already rolling their eyes.
IVAN OELRICH, FEDERATION OF AMERICAN SCIENTISTS: There are some things that really are silly ideas. And just because one idea that everybody thought was silly turns out to be right, that doesn't mean all the other silly ideas might be right.
STARR: Light beams do exist in our lives already -- the laser scanner at grocery checkout, at voting machines, at Customs checkpoints. There is even promising research to see if airborne lasers could shoot down incoming enemy ballistic missiles. But this government funded study looks at very advanced ideas -- disembodied transport, psychic transport through mental power, and movement by altering time and space dimensions. The Warp Drive Metrics report looks impressive -- lots of calculations, discussions of black holes, wormholes, and quantum physics. It even questions whether your soul can be transported across the galaxies with your body.
(on camera): Intergalactic transport would be very handy stuff for future space explorers and soldiers trying to get from one place to another in a big hurry. But for now, most of us will be staying in this galaxy.
(END VIDEO TAPE)
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ANNOUNCER: Still to come, California commuters suffer through noise pollution in hopes of stopping pollution of a different kind.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SIEBERG: Train stations of the Bay Area Rapid Transit District, or Bart for short, have a pigeon problem. Now, that's likely true everywhere, but BART is taking its pigeon battle to new levels of sound. Greg Lyon of CNN affiliate, KRON, has that story.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
GREG LYON, KRON REPORTER: So there you are on the BART platform minding your own business, when you hear it. How you hear, what you hear varies from person to person.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I thought they were birds from like the forest or something. I was like, what are they doing in the middle of El Cerrito?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It almost sounded like it was haunted.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I thought, "Wow, there's a parrot living in the BART station."
LYON: What's actually living in the BART station is a sound system, several tiny green speakers aimed at striking terror in the breast of the common pigeon, according to BART spokesperson, Linton Johnson.
LINTON JOHNSON, BART SPOKESMAN: You hear it from the right and then you hear the birds swooping in, the sound of birds, and then they're gone off to the left. And it's the sound of predatory birds.
LYON: It's easy enough to see why BART thinks pigeons don't make good neighbors. You wouldn't want to sit on this bench by accident or step here. It's a battle that goes back a long way. BART tried plastic owls, pigeons popped on them. So the warfare escalated.
MIKE HEALY, FORMER BART SPOKESMAN: We used rubber snakes, which didn't deter the pigeons at all. They just tossed them off the eves where we put them.
LYON: Former BART spokesman, Mike Healy.
HEALY: And we finally got to a point where we would trap them, take them up to the mountains and the trapper always found that they got back to the stations before the trapper could.
LYON: Hence, the new speakers and the screech of the hawks.
(on camera): The sound system is costing BART about $500 per station, not very much really when you think about it and that's probably a good thing, because the early indications are, this system may not be much better than everything else they've tried.
(Voice-over): With the hawks in full cry, we saw pigeons calmly preening themselves in the rafters of the El Cerrito BART station. It did not appear to the layman that they were in the slightest disturbed, though the sound system does seem to do a good job of disturbing at least some of the BART patrons.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
SIEBERG: You know, maybe they should try playing some recorded cat noises.
All right, it's time for us to fly the coop. But, before we take off, here's a quick preview of next week's show.
How'd you like to make six figure salary playing video games? This guy does and he's 23. We'll introduce you to him and a lot of other interesting characters; a show that looks at many different sides of gaming.
That's coming up on NEXT. Until then, let's hear from you. You can send us an e-mail at NEXT@CNN.com. And don't forget to check out our website, that's at cnn.com/next.
Thanks so much for joining us, for all of us, I'm Daniel Sieberg, we'll see you next time.
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