Poor Frank Pringle, always having to look over his shoulder for assassins.

Why is this man marked for death? Because, like the 100MPG carburetor, Big Oil doesn't want his invention to wreck their industry. Or so he's been told.

You see, he's using microwaves to derive oil and natural gas from waste materials like old tires. The process is a little more involved that nuking trash in a kitchen microwave, however.

Petroleum is composed of strings of hydrocarbon molecules. When microwaves hit the tire, they crack the molecular chains and break it into its component parts: carbon black (an ash-like raw material) and hydrocarbon gases, which can be burned or condensed into liquid fuel. Pringle figured that some gases from his microwaved tire had lingered, and the cold air in the shop had condensed them into diesel. If the process worked on tires, he thought, it should work on anything with hydrocarbons. The trick was in finding the optimum microwave frequency for each material--out of 10 million possibilities.

Already, an auto recycler in Long Island, NY has put in an order for a $5 million, school bus-sized version of his machine called the Hawk.