I would hate to give people false hope, but this 60 Minutes story almost made me fall out of my chair. John Kanzius, a former businessman and radio technician, may have come up with a cure for cancer by building a radio wave machine out of pots and pans and then testing it on hot dogs.

It was the worst kind of luck that gave Kanzius the idea to use radio waves to kill cancer cells: six years ago, he was diagnosed with terminal leukemia and since then has undergone 36 rounds of toxic chemotherapy. But it wasn't his own condition that motivated him, it was looking into the hollow eyes of sick children on the cancer ward at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston...

Kanzius told (60 Minutes correspondent Lesley) Stahl the chemotherapy made him very sick and that he couldn't sleep at night. "And I said, 'There’s gotta be a better way to treat cancer.'"

It was during one of those sleepless nights that the light bulb went off. When he was young, Kanzius was one of those kids who built radios from scratch, so he knew the hidden power of radio waves. Sick from chemo, he got out of bed, went to the kitchen, and started to build a radio wave machine.

"Started looking in the cupboard and I saw pie pans and I said, 'These are perfect. I can modify these,'" he recalled.

Stahl checked out Kanzius's contraption in his garage laboratory in Florida. Since his discovery, he has spent $200,000 of his own money to build a more sophisticated version of his kitchen-made radio wave machine. One box sends radio waves to the other, producing enough energy to activate enough gas in a fluorescent light. He has found that the radio waves are not only safe for humans, but able to break down tumors injected with metal.

We've talked a lot here about sleep, and here is a piece from 60 Minutes talking about just how critical sleep is, and how dangerous sleep deprivation can be:

One thing that's clear, says Walker, is that sleep is critical. In a series of studies done back in the 1980s, rats were kept awake indefinitely. After just five days, they started dying.

Walker says they started dying from sleep deprivation. "In fact, sleep is as essential as food because they will die just about as quick from food deprivation as sleep deprivation. So, it's that necessary," he says.

Sleep isn't just for the lazy: it's critical to proper body function. A study restricting sleep to four hours a night had dire effects:

The study's subjects were on the road to diabetes in just six days, and that’s not all - they were also hungry. Van Cauter has made a radical discovery: that lack of sleep may be contributing to the epidemic of obesity in this country through the work of a hormone called leptin that tells your brain when you’re full.

So, we feed our nation full of High Fructose Corn Syrup, have them work at sedentary jobs near a refrigerator, allow them breaks from work only to eat, and we don't give anyone time to exercise or sleep. The researchers feel that adding sleep deprivation to the list of key diabetes risk factors may be in order, and that it may even be a factor in many disorders we currently associate with old age.