In one, Alexey V. Nikulov of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Microelectronics Technology and High Purity Materials in Chernogolovka, which is near Moscow, focuses on a hollow ring of deeply chilled superconducting material with electrons circulating in its walls. By switching superconductivity on and off in a segment of the ring, Nikulov argues, random thermal fluctuations would generate a useful voltage thereby violating the second law. In the other report, theorists Vladislav C pek and Jiri Bok, both of Charles University in Prague, the Czech Republic, propose that violations might take place even in room-temperature interactions, say, between ions and biomolecules. Indeed, C pek told Science News , those breakdowns of the second law might already be occurring in living systems. There's a caveat that applies to all three reports.
None actually claims to make truly perpetual motion possible.
If the first law could be violated, a machine could operate forever. So, the machine's motion would stop when the bath's temperature hits absolute zero, just as an engine running out of gas would stop. This means that the motion of such a machine wouldn't be perpetual after all. Neither the Russian nor Czech work was published prominent venues such as PRL . The work of C pek and Bok appeared in the December 1999 Czech Journal of Physics .