"Davide Castelvecchi recently has an article published in Nature regarding on the same topic. The article highlighted that the laws of thermodynamics are many times "paradoxical," especially the second law of thermodynamics."
http://www.scienceworldreport.com/ar...namic-laws.htm

The second law of thermodynamics has long been under attack but only for small, microscopic, quantum etc. systems:

Nature 2002: "Second law broken. Researchers have shown for the first time that, on the level of thousands of atoms and molecules, fleeting energy increases violate the second law of thermodynamics." http://www.nature.com/news/2002/0207...s020722-2.html

The truth is that MACROSCOPIC systems violating the second law of thermodynamics are COMMONPLACE. The problem is that misleading education has diverted the attention from relevant examples:

"A necessary component of a heat engine, then, is that two temperatures are involved. At one stage the system is heated, at another it is cooled."
http://physics.bu.edu/~duffy/py105/Heatengines.html

Richard Feynman: "The whole subject of thermodynamics depends essentially upon the following kind of consideration: because a rubber band is "stronger" at higher temperatures than it is at lower temperatures, it ought to be possible to lift weights, and to move them around, and thus to do work with heat." http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_44.html

Educators present the two temperatures as necessary but that is not true - e.g. the rubber-band heat engine described by Feynman has isothermal (one temperature only) analogs which almost obviously violate the second law of thermodynamics:

http://www.gsjournal.net/old/valev/val3.gif

POLYELECTROLYTES AND THEIR BIOLOGICAL INTERACTIONS, A. KATCHALSKY, pp. 13-15: "Let the polymolecule be a negatively charged polyacid in a stretched state and have a length L. Now let us add to the molecule a mineral acid to provide hydrogen ions to combine with the ionized carboxylate groups and transform them into undissociated carboxylic groups according to the reaction RCOO- + H+ = RCOOH. By means of this reaction, the electrostatic repulsion which kept the macromolecule in a highly stretched state vanishes and instead the Brownian motion and intramolecular attraction cause a coiling up of the polymeric chains. Upon coiling, the polymolecule contracts and lifts the attached weight through a distance ΔL. On lifting the weight, mechanical work f*ΔL was performed... [...] FIGURE 4: Polyacid gel in sodium hydroxide solution: expanded. Polyacid gel in acid solution: contracted; weight is lifted."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...0645-0017..pdf

"When the pH is lowered (that is, on raising the chemical potential, μ, of the protons present) at the isothermal condition of 37°C, these matrices can exert forces, f, sufficient to lift weights that are a thousand times their dry weight." http://www.google.com/patents/US5520672

Pentcho Valev