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TORONTO (Reuters) – A small Canadian university has ruled out campus-wide wireless Internet access because its president fears the system’s electromagnetic forces could pose a risk to students’ health.

Lakehead University, in Thunder Bay, Ontario, has only a limited Wi-Fi connections at present, in places where there is no fiber-optic Internet connection. And that, according to president Fred Gilbert, is just fine.

“The jury is still out on the impact that electromagnetic forces have on human physiology,” Gilbert told a university meeting last month, insisting that university policy would not change while he remained president.

“Some studies have indicated that there are links to carcinogenetic occurrences in animals, including humans, that are related to energy fields associated with wireless hotspots, whether those hotspots are transmissions lines, whether they’re outlets, plasma screens, or microwave ovens that leak.”

Lakehead University published a transcript of Gilbert’s remarks on its Web site. Spokeswoman Eleanor Abaya said the decision not to expand the university’s few isolated wireless networks was a “personal decision” by Gilbert.

But the president’s stance has prompted a backlash from students and from Canadian health authorities, who say his fears are overdone.

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Even for the crazy world of quantum mechanics, this one is twisted. A quantum computer program has produced an answer without actually running.

The idea behind the feat, first proposed in 1998, is to put a quantum computer into a “superposition”, a state in which it is both running and not running. It is as if you asked Schrödinger’s cat to hit “Run”.

With the right set-up, the theory suggested, the computer would sometimes get an answer out of the computer even though the program did not run. And now researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have improved on the original design and built a non-running quantum computer that really works.

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Sweden says it aims to completely wean itself off oil within 15 years – without building new nuclear plants.

The attempt is being planned by a committee of industrialists, academics, car manufacturers, farmers and others.

The country aims to replace all fossil fuels with renewables before climate change damages economies and growing oil scarcity leads to price rises.

According to the Guardian newspaper, a Swedish minister said oil dependency could be broken by 2020.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is worried that oil supplies are peaking, shortly to dwindle, and that high oil prices could cause global economic recession.

“Our dependency on oil should be broken by 2020,” said Mona Sahlin, Sweden’s minister of sustainable development.

“There shall always be better alternatives to oil, which means no house should need oil for heating, and no driver should need to turn solely to gasoline.”

The Scandinavian country, which was hard hit by oil price rises in the 1970s, now gets the majority of its electricity from nuclear and hydroelectric power. In 2003, 26% of all energy consumed came from renewables, compared with an EU average of 6%.

The oil committee is to report to parliament in several months. Swedish energy ministry officials said they expected the panel to recommend further development of biofuels derived from its substantial forests.

It was also expected to expand other renewable energies such as wind and wave power.

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