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07/31/05 - BMWs hydrogen burning car In two or three years, BMW is supposed to add another kind of engine to the mix -- one you can fill up with either gasoline or hydrogen. There its V-12 experimental car, the H2R, has hit speeds of 186 mph. A hydrogen-burning version of its 7 Series sedan is supposed to be launched by 2008. Although burning hydrogen would essentially eliminate tailpipe emissions, it has other problems. Hydrogen is highly flammable. There are only a handful of hydrogen filling stations in the country. And hydrogen isn't cheap: A kilogram, which produces about the same amount of energy as a gallon of gasoline, costs more than $3. Hydrogen-combustion vehicles also go only about two-thirds as far as gasoline vehicles on a tank of fuel. And while BMW's experimental car is achieving great speeds, it's not clear whether the same kind of power can be achieved in models that will run on gasoline as well as hydrogen. 07/31/05 - Natural gas powered microturbines (These could just as well run on hydrogen - JWD) Microturbines are small combustion turbines, usually about the size of a refrigerator, that generate anywhere from 25 to 500 kilowatts of electricity. They've been around since the 1960s, and are used as power sources in everything from cars to telephones. The company builds a 100-kilowatt microturbine that also produces 172 kilowatts of thermal energy. While the microturbine is generating electricity, waste heat from the exhaust gases is recovered to produce hot water. The combined heat and power system, which Elliott started building about 1 1/2 years ago and sells for about $90,000, has a larger demand, Dewis said. The company says users can make their money back in less than three years from the savings on energy bills. 07/31/05 - Vibration as artificial 'gravity' Past studies have shown that vibrating an astronaut's legs and feet helps to prevent muscle decay or bone decalcification. Daniel Beysens, a researcher at the Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique (CEA, dbeysens@cea.fr) and his colleagues study this problem at the much more basic level of individual bubbles and droplets, and what happens to them when you add or subtract the effects of gravity. The vibrations cause motion in the fluid, which induces effects that resemble gravity. Bubbles and droplets go "up" and "down" again when the vibration is turned on. As far as simulating gravity, vibrations seem to work. 07/31/05 - Ancient prophecy is modern reality (So why do 'prophecies' always come out during or after the event happens? - JWD) John Mohawk, Seneca historian and Indian Country Today columnist, recalled not long ago the mutual visits by Hopi and Haudenosaunee traditionalists as early as 1948, where a prophetic tradition, popularly referred to as ''the purification,'' was exchanged. This was way before the ecology movement, before ''New Age'' and even before the ''energy crisis.'' The elder Indian spiritualists from the Hopi of that time not only had prophecies of meeting ''Indians from the East,'' they actually fulfilled their own tradition and traveled east to meet and tell the Haudenosaunee about it. The sincere exchange of views that followed saw these and other Native peoples review and renew their prophetic traditions and this dialogue, largely unrecorded, has gone on for more than a half a century after the 1948 visit. Unlike the faith-based Christian liturgy, what the Hopi tradition warned about involved patterns of human activity on Mother Earth that had profound and predictable consequences. They expressed, as have most Indian traditionalists to this day, that the greed for material possessions and technological gadgetry had the potential to severely affect the systems of the earth and that this was in fact happening within Western civilization, which they were witnessing, and that they had been told they should warn all peoples about the impending changes and disasters. 07/31/05 - New Solar Cell discovery Unique thin-film solar panels can be produced at a fraction of the cost of today's photovoltaic solar panels. IAUS is on schedule to begin mass production of its solar panels by September 2005. Once in production, IAUS will be able to turn out nearly 200 megawatts of solar panels yearly, nearly 10 times greater capacity than a $100 million photovoltaic fabrication plant. A solar area of only 100 square miles -- a size of land that equals only nine percent of the state of Nevada -- can generate enough electricity for the entire United States. The world energy market is $3 trillion per year. This $3 trillion does not represent nearly 30% of the world without electricity. 07/31/05 - Russia planning Lunar Power Plants “In essence we are talking about getting access to deposits of new energy supplies. We understand that we must move step by step in the practical developing of the Moon - the first stage will be flying around it, the second stage will be landing and then we are going to build an energy base on the Moon. After this, we are going to build a large power plant on the Moon,” the official said. A single shuttle loaded with helium-3 mined on the lunar surface would be enough to supply the entire electrical power needs of the United States for an entire year, U.S. space researchers have said. 07/31/05 - Ford Ranger Pickup truck runs on wood In 1998, however, the (PDF doc) Federal Emergency Management Agency published an instruction booklet on how to use the fuel for tractors and trucks in the event the gasoline supply was disrupted. Dowden has two recycled oil drums attached to the back of his pickup, one for wood chips and one containing sawdust for filtering gases. The burning wood creates carbon monoxide and hydrogen, combustible gases he routes through filters to the engine. It's safe, he says, because all the parts are welded together, and a vacuum keeps the gases from leaking. The wood pellets are the same ones used for wood stoves and cost about $3 for a 40-pound bag; 1 pound can power the truck for a mile. Despite his modifications, the car can still run on gasoline. Dowden uses wood only when driving around his neighborhood, because the fastest the truck can go is 55 miles an hour. With gasoline, he can go 75 miles an hour. Also this: Mother Earth article on burning wood for fuel. 07/31/05 - Reduced gravity in space accelerates aging? Vernikos says that astronauts returning from a mission in the near gravity of Space show startling changes that are normally linked to old age. After only weeks in space, their coordination and balance are disturbed; muscles and bones weaken; like diabetics, they become resistant to insulin; they do not absorb nutrients as well; they have less stamina and have problems getting a good night of sleep. Vernikos points out those astronauts recover from these changes but that older people do not- or so we have been led to believe. Seeking the cause of these symptoms and ways to prevent them, she began working with young, healthy volunteers lying in bed for weeks on end. She observed the same “aging” symptoms as those seen in astronauts. Exercise helped but was not the whole answer. In research done with astronauts, volunteers, and the elderly, Verikos developed her her theory that many changes that come with age are not due to simply growing older, but most likely are the result of forgetting to use gravity and adopting a lifestyle that uses this force less and less over many years. 07/31/05 - Cool Solar indoor lighting system The system’s 48-inch primary mirror concentrates light into a secondary mirror, which strips away the infrared and ultraviolet components, and directs the visible light into the receiver. A tracking system has two motors governed by a GPS microprocessor, which can calculate the position of the sun within half a degree. This enables the mirror to follow the sun across the sky like a sunflower, gathering in maximum light intensity throughout the day. The tracking system itself requires very little power to operate. It could be supported by a small solar cell - equivalent to a 9-volt battery (which would last about a week). Latest model of the HSL 3000, mounted on a flat roof. Dish is 4 feet in diameter, and lights 1000 square feet inside the building, minus the UV rays. Expected lifetime: 20 years. 07/31/05 - An Engine powered by Temperature Differences? Yep! Described simply, a wheel-spoked with thin strands of a high expansion/contraction alloy called 55-Nitinol-rotates over baths of solar-warmed and cold water. During the cold half of the cycle, the "spokes" become limp and as they pass into the hot water, the strands attempt to straighten themselves back into their original shape. The resulting spring-like action against the throw of a fixed crankshaft sets the engine in motion. Ridgeway Banks, the inventor, is now working on a model expected to be capable of powering an electrical generator! 07/31/05 - GM hydrogen fuel car General Motors has developed a prototype hydrogen car that has a 300-mile range and can accelerate from 0 to 60 miles per hour in less than 10 seconds. Its only emission is water. Since hydrogen can be produced from water using nuclear heat, one can picture a minimally polluting energy infrastructure in the future, using hydrogen provided by a new generation of nuclear plants for transportation. Such a major commitment to hydrogen has other advantages. The hydrogen car's engine uses one-tenth as many moving parts as the internal combustion engine, and could be assembled more cheaply. 07/31/05 - Corn to biodegradable plastic The plastic churned out by his factory may look and feel like the oil-based commodity the world has become used to in the past 40 years. But there is one crucial difference: the raw material is corn not oil. Not only does its plastic come from corn - an enticing prospect for retailers as oil hovers at $60 a barrel - it is also biodegradable and so hints that the future need not be one of spiralling dumps of plastic waste. The Nebraska plant has a capacity of little more than 130,000 tons of plastic, a tiny fraction of the global industry. If every plastics plant in America turned to corn it would cut oil consumption by hundreds of millions of barrels, yet would still leave the nation burning billions more for power and fuel. 07/30/05 - Palestinian students invent novel hydrogen generator to power automobiles (EXCELLENT!!!!!! Because they power the car engine DIRECTLY from Hydrogen, no fuel cell/electric conversion, question is, how much, how fast? - JWD) The inventors, students of the Palestine Polytechnic University (PPU) in Hebron told WAFA that their invention is summarized by generating electric energy through using Hydrogen derived from water, by a small generator, instead of using other classical sources like gasoline or benzene. They came up with their invention as an alternative source of energy able to operate cars by using hydrogen derived from water. They also revealed that the importance of this invention does not lay in deriving Hydrogen, but in using it as a source of generating power in direct way without storing it. 07/30/05 - Foreboding from Strange weather Marine biologists are spotting ominous signs all along the Pacific Coast this year: higher nearshore ocean temperatures, plummeting catches of groundfish, an explosion of dead birds on coastal beaches, and perhaps most disturbing, very few plankton - the tiny critters that form the basis of the ocean's intricate food web. From California to British Columbia, unusual weather patterns have disrupted the marine ecosystem, scientists say. The normal northerly winds failed to show up this year, preventing the usual upwelling of colder water that sustains the plankton, and in turn, many other species from anchovies to cormorants to whales. If these patterns continue, it could show that something in the atmosphere - and the Pacific Ocean - has permanently changed, with serious consequences for coastal birds, fish and marine mammals. It may be just an unusual year. Similar ecological signs have appeared during El Niño years, when increased sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific alter weather patterns worldwide. But scientists say the West Coast hasn't had El Niño conditions this year. It's too soon to draw conclusions. Scientists can do little more than take notes, and wait. 07/30/05 - Scottish Wavepower device dismissed by Department of Industry The Department of Industry, which ran a multi-million-pound competition for new ideas in wave or tide energy, has dismissed Leslie's invention. It wrote and told him so, in that dead, bureaucratic language which showed that it had neither studied nor properly understood his idea. It is based on a complex system of expansion and compression coils containing a mixture of air and water, capable of producing high levels of energy. The coils are contained within a steel cylinder fitted with fins, which would float just below the surface of the water, anchored to the sea-bed by chains, and rotated by the force of the tides. Leslie has already demonstrated, on a small, home-made model, that it can produce pressure sufficient to drive a jet of water vertically into the air. The larger the machine, the greater the power. The Leslie Pump is big enough to generate 10 kilowatts, enough to power a large house. It will be tested in Lerwick harbour. "The great value of my device is that it has no moving parts," he told me. "Therefore, you can make it as big as you want, and it is extremely reliable. I am building a model big enough to pump seven tons of water 30 feet into the air. I reckon that just £200,000 worth of steel would be enough to produce 1,000 kilowatts of energy." 07/30/05 - Indian non-conventional Energy Sources Appropriate Rural Technology Institute (ARTI) helped development of improved choolah which burns fuel more efficiently, giving out a blue flame; a biogas process which makes use of starch or sugar instead of cowdung, which has won the US Environment Protection Agency’s prize. Another chemist, Zadgaonkar, hit upon the idea of plastic as a fuel in a Chemistry class in 1999 when she realised that the molecular structure of plastic and fuels was strikingly similar. "The process works on all kinds of plastic typically found in a landfill. We use a universal catalytic additive and heat to a specific degree to depolymerise the carbon to carbon bond. The products of the process are liquid hydrocarbon, coke and gas. The liquid distillation matches high quality desulphurised crude." 07/30/05 - Reciprocal criticism to overcome entropic failure Entropy, frequently used to describe disorganization - a physical tendency of phenomena to become more diffuse, more chaotic if left solely to their own devices. Failure would seem to be a kind of entropy, or at least a common result of it. Without the input of compensating energy to fuel new structure, to increase complexity or to simply maintain the status quo, all matter decays, falls apart, wears out or dies in time. Failure is a human invention. It's our notion that something has fallen short of its intended purpose or of our expectations. It is a lack of success. Is failure avoidable? "In science, we rely on failure. You never want to get a result exactly as predicted. You learn deeper truths from failures." The same idea, he said, applies to life. Death is what happens when life fails. 07/30/05 - Suncone - New Solar Thermal Concentrator Suncone technology can operate at higher temperatures and higher efficiencies than parabolic trough solar collectors and is less expensive than troughs or parabolic dish concentrators. Like the parabolic dish, it must be pointed toward the sun but requires less sun-tracking precision than a parabolic dish or parabolic trough. Suncone is less prone hail damage than troughs or dishes. Extensive patent searches have been made and a patent application has been filed. Suncone uses non-imaging optics with cones made of aluminized plastics that concentrate sunlight onto a target. A major innovative principle of Suncone is the manner in which the cones are held in position. The cones stay cool, while the target reaches high temperatures. In addition to improving solar electric power generation, Suncone can be applied to seawater desalination utilizing the Kinetic Pump (another new patent-pending invention being developed by HYTEC, the same company behind the Suncone). The resulting desalination plant could economically produce fresh water with no fossil fuel energy required, says the company. 07/30/05 - Controlled electrical discharges Applied Physics Letters reports on success in ionizing a path in air that served to channel an artificial electric discharge. This recent experiment is notable because it was carried out under conditions of simulated rain. The length of the laboratory discharge was only about a meter, so this technology has a ways to go before it can be used to control real lightning bolts. an Arizona company named Ionatron demonstrated the use of laser-guided electric discharges in something it calls a "portal denial system," which can be set up in a corridor and switched on to prevent intruders from passing through. Three beams in this system create a virtual electric fence that spans the width of a hallway. Steve McCahon, Ionatron's executive vice president for technology and engineering, explains that the company's system demonstrated nonlethal levels of deterrence but "that doesn't mean you couldn't turn it up." Are guns next? According to the boldly written claim on its Web site, "Ionatron intends to use our compact, non-lethal LIPC [laser-induced plasma-channel] technology to replace guns as the weapon of choice in close-range defense." 07/30/05 - Encouraging Environmental Inventions "Solar energy is the biggest waste resource in New Zealand. "If the government or local bodies were to subsidise solar hot water heating, we would see an enormous reduction in peak load. Nearly 50 percent of the average household electricity bill is hot water heating." Another renewable energy source Auckland could consider is a tidal turbine system that harnesses energy from water pumping in and out of the harbours. Another invention of immense practical use is the award-winning flycatcher which lures flies into two holes punched in a soft drink bottle. A piece of meat is put inside to encourage them. It is mixed with water, which repels the insects and makes them instinctively fly upwards through the neck of the bottle. They are trapped in another soft drink bottle which has had its bottom cut out and is jammed on top of the lower bottle. The flies die as a result of heat generated from placing the device in the sun, or from a bit of flyspray if people want. It can trap hundreds of flies, which can be emptied out by lifting up the top bottle, making it a "recyclable recyclable". 07/30/05 - Raw Sewages used to heat/cool buildings Chinese researchers say they have invented a cheap and eco-friendly way to keep city-dwellers warm in winter and cool in summer - using untreated sewage. Their device extracts heat from raw sewage that has been temporarily diverted on its way to the processing plant. It can also make air conditioning units run more efficiently, and absorb the heat they remove from buildings. The device can reduce the cost of heating and air conditioning systems by 20 per cent. Sun's invention works in conjunction with the standard 'heat pump' system used in air conditioning units. By creating a series of filters to retain the solid waste, which would otherwise block the pipes, the device leaves the liquid component free to enter the pump and transfer its heat to a coil filled with Freon - the trade name for a gas used as a refrigerant. The liquid sewage then returns to the device to carry the solid waste away to the processing plant. The Freon, meanwhile, is compressed to further warm it, and diverted to a condenser, which heats a water-filled coil. A fan blows the heated air around the coil into the room. 07/30/05 - 1973 Imris patent claims overunity (Similar to the claims of free energy with arc discharges in vacua by Chernetskii, diagram #4 is reminscent of the EV Gray power tube - JWD) When the optical generator is the same as described for Test No 18 and there are 100 fluorescent lamps in series in the circuit, the total power input is 227.7 watts for the optical generator and 1,090 watts for 100 fluorescent lamps or a total of 1,318 watts. The total power input normally required to operate the 100 fluorescent lamps in a normal circuit would be 40 watts times 100 or 4,000 watts. Thus, by using the optical generator in the circuit, about 2,680 watts of energy are saved. At higher pressures, the device becomes Over Unity. For instance, with a Xenon filled tube at 5,000 torr in a series circuit with 100 40 Watt flouresent lamps (with a single wire going to each end of each lamp), the optical generator pulls 332 Watts, with each lamp pulling 9 tenths Watt (at 5 Volts) for 3,200 lumens output (8.8 Watts) per tube - giving a total for the circuit of 880 Watts output for 442 Watts input. 07/30/05 - 10 square foot solar collector weighs 19 pounds SolarRoofs.com recently introduced a new line of solar water heating collectors and systems. Called the Fireball 10-01, these 10 square foot collectors weigh only 19 pounds! Despite their small footprint and light weight they generate the energy equal to a 500 Watt solar Electric "PV" system, at a fraction of the price. The collectors are made from high performance copper absorbers and double wall polycarbonate glazing. Because of their low weight they can ship by UPS or FedEx ground and feature patented "Disappearing Headers" for damage free shipping. SolarRoofs.com refers to the 10-01 as "convenient building blocks to power and energy independence" These "Handy Sized" collectors are ideal for residential, RV and marine applications and can be matched with a PV system for increasing overall solar energy system performance. MSRP $295.00US 07/30/05 - Another report on the Welsh engine (Thanks for the URL Nick! - JWD) IMP has been working on the development and optimisation of a high torque, low speed silent electric motor which was launched to great acclaim in Hanover in April this year. IP Wales has given IMP help with taking out a patent for a new design of a 5-stage high torque electric motor. The motor has no brushes, making it ideal for use in the petrochemical industry and other sectors where sparks present a hazard - meaning it has a huge functional advantage over competitors’ products. The motor design offers several other important features, which include full torque from 0 rpm, and no gearbox is required. The motor also has 100 per cent speed control with the motor only taking power as and when required. IP Wales has given IMP help with taking out a patent for a new design of a 5-stage high torque electric motor. This will be extended to cover not only the UK but also mainland Europe, USA and Hong Kong. 07/29/05 - Revolutionary new Welsh Electric Motor Imagine an electric car that produces hardly any noise, no air pollution, and is as fast as a Ferrari. As well as high performance vehicles, there are plans for a battery-powered family car with a range of hundreds of miles. The motor is revolutionary in that it contains no bulky permanent magnets. Instead it relies on transmitting electric pulses across up to seven rotors, arranged in different phases. These are "fired up" in turn, much like the pistons of an internal combustion engine. There are no gears - the motor provides enough torque at one revolution per minute to put a vehicle into motion - and it spins at up to 2,500rpm. "Size for size, we can provide 400% more torque than any type of motor currently available," says managing director John Bryant. At present, providing enough battery life is a problem. But battery technology is improving all the time, and Mr Bryant does not see it as a major obstacle. 07/29/05 - Is this Welsh motor the 'new' EV Gray motor? The control unit, acting in a manner similar to that of a distributor in an internal combustion engine, regulates the spikes, determines their polarity (whether they be north or south) and directs their power to selected electro-magnets in the main unit. While this occurs, the recycle/regeneration system is recharging the batteries with 60 to 120-amp pulses. The electro-magnets are located on both the rotor and stator of the large motor. Attraction and repulsion between the two sets of magnets causes the motor to operate and generate horsepower. Note: EV Gray used 3 phase, the Welsh motor is using 7 phase. 07/29/05 - Wind powered Public Transportation System Sustainable transport in Wellington, New Zealand - We want to power as much of our public transport network as possible by clean, renewable local wind power. Two wind turbines could power Wellington's entire trolley bus fleet. Calgary in Canada has used a local wind farm to power its modern tram system since 2003, moving 155,000 passengers daily. Wellington has many suitable locations for windfarms (and, of course, some that are unsuitable). Wind is 100 percent clean, 100 percent renewable, and we have plenty of it. Let's use it to power our transport system. 07/29/05 - Personal Windmills (I posted this from another source earlier but this one gives some interesting details. - JWD) Personal windmills could be useful in rural settings where space is ample and electricity sometimes costly. Current small-scale wind energy generators cost about $2,400 (U.S.), Knight and his colleagues determined. On an average day of wind, one can produce 5.2 kilowatt-hours per day. According to Natural Resources Canada, the average household consumes between 34 and 67 kilowatt-hours per day. Most small-scale generators require wind speeds of at least 11 mph (18 kilometers per hour) to generate any power, the scientists say. The new device would work with winds of just 6 mph (10 kph). 07/29/05 - How to build a Fuel Cell A fuel cell is a device that converts a fuel such as hydrogen, alcohol, gasoline, or methane into electricity directly. A hydrogen fuel cell produces electricity without any pollution, since pure water is the only byproduct. You can make a hydrogen fuel cell in your kitchen in about 10 minutes, and demonstrate how hydrogen and oxygen can combine to produce clean electrical power. Platinum acts as a catalyst, something that makes it easier for the hydrogen and oxygen to recombine. The electrolysis reaction reverses. Instead of putting electricity into the cell to split the water, hydrogen and oxygen combine to make water again, and produce electricity. We initially get a little over two volts from the fuel cell. As the bubbles pop, dissolve in the water, or get used up by the reaction, the voltage drops, quickly at first, then more slowly. 07/29/05 - Build your own Outdoor Mist Cooling System The theory behind this is not something new. Not at all. Especially not to people in the desert states in the US, as it’s quiet common there. You can buy professional misting systems from $70 (for a fan) up to several thousands of dollars for your whole patio. The theory behind this system is as simple as genius. You send water trough a nozzle and the nozzle will create a fine spray, or a mist, and when the water hits the air then the water drops will evaporate. When water evaporates it needs energy for the transformation and it will in the process cool itself a couple of degrees. The faster the water exits through the nozzle, the finer the water droplets will be. And the finer they are the faster they will evaporate. Another advantage of having higher pressure is of course also that you will push more water through the nozzles and the more water the cooler it gets. 07/29/05 - Eating Salmon to reduce sunburn A new study has revealed that fatty fish like salmon can help holidaymakers avoid serious skin problems because it contains a natural defence to the sun's UV rays. The researchers found that fatty acids known as Omega 3, which are found in salmon, herring and trout, act as a natural shield against the sun's radiation. "Some also believe that the big changes in our diet during the past 50 years are making our skin more vulnerable to both sun and pollution. What we do know is that all of Western Europe has increased consumption of inexpensive vegetable fat, while consumption of marine fatty acids has dropped drastically." The discovery was made after the scientists realised that a balance between the Omega 3 acids and Omega 6 acids found in vegetable oil provided a natural shield against harmful sun rays. 07/29/05 - Microsoft XP verification hacked Microsoft started requiring users to verifiy their serial number before using Windows Update. This effort to force users to either buy XP or tell them where you got the illegal copy is called 'Genuine Advantage.' It was cracked within 24 hours." Before pressing 'Custom' or 'Express' buttons paste this text to the address bar and press enter: javascript:void(window.g_sDisableWGACheck='all') It turns off the trigger for the key check. Also: how many of the almost 4 dozen default-enabled services does Windows XP really need in order to preserve basic functioning, like web surfing and running applications? Zero, as it turns out. Mark Russinovich at Sysinternals demonstrates that if certain steps are followed, Windows XP will still run with only two active processes: System and Csrss.exe. No Smss.exe, Winlogon.exe, Services.exe, Lsass.exe... And, contrary to the expectations of various lead engineers at Microsoft, even Internet Explorer will still work under such conditions. 07/29/05 - Zit and skin/facial blemish zapper $225 - Handheld, portable electronic medical device that is clinically proven to make pimples disappear fast. In an FDA-reviewed, controlled clinical trial, 90% of blemishes treated with Zeno disappeared or faded within 24 hours. It uses a medical heat dose treatment on individual acne blemishes in people with mild to moderate acne. It is best-suited to treat newly emerging blemishes - the ones where you can just feel a new bump forming under the skin. Zeno delivers a precisely controlled dose of heat to the area for 2-1/2 minutes. Dr. Crutchfield recommends treating blemishes 2-4 times, at least one hour apart, over the first 4-12 hours of a blemish's appearance. It works by destroying bacteria and shortening the pimple's life cycle significantly. 07/29/05 - US led Kyoto alternative AN AMERICAN-led plan to rely on new technologies to tackle global warming was launched yesterday amid claims it is a "Machiavellian pact" to undermine the Kyoto agreement on climate change. The partnership deal with five other countries, Australia, China, India, South Korea and Japan, focuses on the promotion of replacements for fossil fuels, such as clean coal, nuclear, wind and solar power, but sets no targets for the reduction of emissions. The six countries, which account for nearly half the world's greenhouse emissions, said the pact would "seek to address energy, climate change and air pollution issues within a paradigm of economic development". 07/29/05 - Cranberries to fight ulcers With approximately 80 percent of stomach ulcers caused by bacteria, a recent clinical study in China, suggests that drinking cranberry juice daily could help reduce infection. In the first clinical study of its kind, the research shows that people who drink Ocean Spray cranberry juice twice a day are three times more likely to suppress the bacteria that cause stomach ulcers than those who do not. Already known to promote urinary tract health through its anti-adhesion, or ‘anti-stick’ properties, this study further supports cranberry’s unique role in providing health benefits in other parts of the body. Stomach ulcers occur when these bacteria stick to the stomach wall and weaken its protective mucus coating. Research shows that cranberry proanthocyanidins (PACs) are unique compounds that give the fruit this anti-adhesion power, preventing the bacteria from “sticking” to the stomach wall as it does in the urinary tract and the mouth. 07/29/05 - Beer Ring radio controlled flying X-UFO toy (Could this be scaled up, made large enough to carry one or more passengers? - JWD) UFO with progressive technology, which can be flown easily. The R/C x-space-UFO in the sky, which is compact and gracefully designed. Its gyroscope provides incredible stability and with four high-speed counter-rotating electric motors this flight toy differs clearly from other products on the marktet. The light carbon fiber framework with extremely sturdy EPP outer hull prevents the toy from damage during play. The radius of action can amount up to 100m. 4 channel proportional radio control. 07/29/05 - Something to kill 'time' in the office Someone said to me that I could patent the use of the Maulies and sell the ideas. But I told him: "There is enough greed in the world. I want to help people. I want their life to be a better life. I want them to have what I have. A whole range of guns. Made from office supplies." 07/28/05 - Fuel Cell Motorcycle A 1-kilowatt fuel cell generator provides power directly to the drive-train (there are no gears), and the fuel cell is teamed with a battery pack to provide 6 kilowatts of peak load to the motor. That's good enough, the company says, to get the aluminum-frame bike to 50 mph on or off road, and a full tank of hydrogen delivers up to four hours of continuous--and very quiet--use. The fuel cell itself, called Core, is detachable from the motorcycle and can be used to power "anything from a motorboat to a small domestic property," the company says. Consumers could get their hands on the throttle sometime next year. The initial price is expected to be around $6,000, which a Boston Globe automotive writer delicately says "may be overly optimistic." 07/28/05 - Windpower prices fall as oil, gasoline prices double While oil prices have more than doubled in the past two years, and gasoline prices have gone up with them, the cost of generating electricity by wind has fallen 80 percent in the past decade. "Our two wind turbines are rather small, not on a wind farm scale, but we have a voluntary renewable energy rate for customers," said the electric company's manager of economic and rate research, Joe Provencio. The two turbines cost $2.2 million and generate a megawatt, or 1 million kilowatt hours a year, which enough to supply more than 500 El Paso homes with power. For $1.92 per 100 kilowatt hour plus their regular electric costs, El Paso Electric customers in Texas can effectively buy their power from the wind turbines. The average El Paso home uses about 500 kilowatt hours a month -- half the state average -- and is billed $57.49. 07/28/05 - Branson to build fleet of Commercial Spaceships The first flights are scheduled for 2008 and will cost 200,000 dollars. Virgin said it hopes to bring the cost down as the hardware develops. Under the deal, Virgin Galactic has placed orders for five of Rutan's SpaceShipTwo and two of his White Knight Two launch systems with options on further systems. It has also secured the exclusive use of the systems for the initial 18 months of commercial passenger operations. "Richard and I share a vision that commercially-viable and safe space tourism will provide the foundation for the human colonization of space," Rutan said in the statement. "This will truly herald an era of personal spaceflight first described by the visionary science fiction writers of the 1940's and 1950's." 07/28/05 - Chinese using geothermal heat pumps to produce power Geothermal energy is the heat stored in the Earth's crust. In Beijing, most of it will come from shallower ground, according to Sun. The top 100 metres of the Earth's surface maintain average temperatures of below 25 C and pumps can get it out and use it to heat or cool, according to Sun. "Like a cave, this temperature is warmer than the air above it in the winter and cooler than the air above in the summer," he said. "The biggest advantage is that consumption does not have any impact on the environment." So far, 3 million square metres of buildings have adopted the technology in Beijing, and its use is expected to replace 112,500 tons of coal or 75 million cubic metres of natural gas in winter alone, said Sun. 07/28/05 - Congress Told Hydrogen Fuel Decades from Being Practical "In ten, 15 years there will be trial fleets - prototypes of what these technologies could be," he said. "But the costs will still be substantially above what conventional vehicle costs are. Our own estimates are that to look at when hydrogen and fuel cells could have a noticeable impact on transportation energy consumption, we judge that to be at least 40, 50 years away." No one is predicting an easy transition from gasoline. For one thing, massive amounts of hydrogen would have to be collected. In nature, hydrogen is almost always found in molecules with other elements. Breaking those molecules apart to extract pure hydrogen requires energy. An electric current, for instance, can split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, essentially the reverse of what takes place inside a hydrogen fuel cell. Aside from enormous technological leaps, forging a "hydrogen economy" would require a massive overhaul of America's, and the world's, infrastructure. Yet proponents appear undaunted. They point to humanity's pioneering spirit and say that what may seem insurmountable today could be solved tomorrow. Even skeptics admit that oil consumption cannot continue indefinitely, and eventually a replacement for gasoline-powered vehicles will have to be embraced. 07/28/05 - Lost heat found in the ocean Earth is absorbing more energy from the Sun than it is emitting back to space. Their climate model predicted that growing amounts of human-produced greenhouse gases would trap solar radiation and lead to a warming planet. If the model were correct, it should be possible to find all that excess heat somewhere -- and they did. New measurements show that, over the past ten years, the heat content of the ocean has grown dramatically. It's grown by so much that it can finally account for the excess energy that the climate model calculated should exist. It is, in fact, a match. "It takes at least a 1000 times more energy to raise the temperature of the ocean than it does the atmosphere." "We know that if the ocean temperature is rising," says Willis, "there is a lot of energy that is causing it. The only way we have to explain that much heating is by greenhouse gases." Even with its great storage ability, some of the heat will go toward warming the atmosphere. Hansen, Willis and their colleagues conclude that even with no further increase in greenhouse gases, the temperature of Earth will rise about 0.6 degrees centigrade (1.1 degrees Fahrenheit). 07/28/05 - Apollo-type program for cold fusion "The US has always believed," analyzes the Guardian, "that there would be some kind of magic bullet, such as cold fusion or some other theoretically plausible but unlikely method of producing electricity, or perhaps hydrogen as an alternative to fossil fuels", but outside the G8 negotiating rooms, no one believed that. Indeed the US plan to save the world climate through new hydrogen technologies, "clean" conventional power plants that that generate power from hydrocarbons but release no carbon to the atmosphere, and nuclear fusion. What they mean is, however, hot fusion, not cold fusion. 07/28/05 - Ethics of enhancing the body for sports Surgery first performed on Tommy John has been done hundreds of times, perhaps on 10 percent of today's major-league pitchers. They had torn or stretched ligaments around their elbows. Surgeons removed the damaged ligaments, drilled holes in the humerus and ulna bones at the elbow and laced through those holes a tendon taken from somewhere it wasn't needed, usually the wrist. A year later, his performance enhanced, the pitcher was not only back in business, he might have been throwing even harder than before. Stem cell research now being done shows that manipulation of cells can create more powerful muscles, stronger tendons, more durable joints. Let's say that in 2025 someone hits 91 home runs in a season and says, "It's a great honor to break Barry Bonds' record, and I want to thank him for his encouragement. At the same time, I couldn't have done it without my stem cell scientist giving me this new, improved body built by re-engineering my own cells." 07/28/05 - Fountain of eternal youth UW scientists have discovered how the build-up of mutated DNA triggers ageing in mice. When the proteins for repairing mitochondrial DNA were genetically tweaked, the mice accumulated mutations faster than in unaltered mice. The slower the rate of mutation, the slower the process of ageing, and the researchers hope to replicate this in humans as well. Cells die when a lifetime of small mutations in our genetic code builds up. This leads to greying hair, vision impairment, weakened bones. DNA mutations accumulate in each cell’s energy plant, or mitochondria. When they shut down, so do the cells and ageing sets in. So it should be possible to develop anti-ageing drugs to prevent mutations in the mitochondrial DNA, either for the whole body or for specific areas like the forehead or hair follicles. 07/28/05 - Sustainable Farms Farms are inherently fragile: Their productivity can be sustained only if fossil fuel subsidies, in one form or another, are employed as inputs. Most farms entail, as well, other very serious environmental costs. Clearly, we need to create new food raising systems that will conserve soil, water, and nutrients ... minimize the use of fossil fuels, chemical fertilizers, and synthetic pesticides ... and lead to regionally self-reliant food systems. Two million small farms in this country produce 20% of our food, and gardens alone supply an estimated $16 billion worth of produce each year. As heartening as this sounds, most of us still depend on food produced on large farms that are far removed from the point of consumption. 07/28/05 - Mallove 2nd assailant arrested Police said Reilly was with Gary McAvoy on the night of May 14, 2004, when officers found the badly beaten body of Gene Mallove at his childhood home in Norwich. Mallove, 56, was cleaning out the rental property when he was killed. Mallove, the former head science writer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote a controversial book on fusion energy. His book was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. 07/27/05 - DIY Home Solar Concentrator (I think using raw solar arrays are missing the point when you can concentrate sunlight and increase output, ideally feeding a thermoelectric chip array at the focus or a Stirling engine system. - JWD) Specifications for this project; High Efficiency, High Temperature, 20,000 Btu output, Simple Construction, Common Materials and Automatic Tracking. You should achieve around 20,000 Btu of thermal energy which is equivalent to about 6000 watts of electric heat any time you have unobstructed sunshine, summer or winter. Teton Engineering's Tracking Solar Concentrator is an array of 116 mirrors, one square foot each mounted on a framework and arranged to reflect sunlight on a "collector." The concentrated sunlight can raise the collector temperature to about 1200F, but we will run a cooling fluid, usually automotive type anti-freeze through it to absorb the heat just as it does in your car's engine. Lots of fantastic modification possibilities for this. 07/27/05 - Fruit & Veggies for fuel Cyprus's abundance of fruits, grapes and potatoes could soon end up where you least expect it; in your fuel tank. Ethanol fuel can be used in vehicles running on normal petrol. Biodiesel can be derived from used edible oils which are now simply discarded, or mixed in with other substances and used as animal feed. "Alcohol fuel can be derived from a number of agricultural products, grain, potatoes and fruits. And instead of sending surplus crops into pits we can use them to process fuel," said Roditis. 07/27/05 - Methane effects on environment twice as bad (Also check out prior posts about methane from human and animal waste as well as landfill garbage dumps. Wouldn't it be slick if you could somehow filter methane from ambient air? Some kind of 'methane' magnet or sponge. - JWD) Methane, one of the leading greenhouse gases is emitted from both man-made and natural sources. Methane is known as a 'well mixed' greenhouse gas because of its long lifetime of a decade or more, which allows it to disperse evenly around the atmosphere. Sources of methane include natural sources like wetlands, gas hydrates in the ocean floor, permafrost, termites, oceans, freshwater bodies, and non-wetland soils. Fossil fuels, agricultural animals, landfills and rice paddies are the main human-related sources. 07/27/05 - Way Cool Yahoo Widgets! Konfabulator - over 600 neat free applications! 07/27/05 - Patent for Self-Running EM machine (Thanks to Mike for alerting us to this! - JWD) An apparatus for self-generating a driving force, which employs an electromotive force generated on a coil by an electromagnetic induction, in combination with a mechanical driving device to drive a rotating shaft of the device, such that the rotating shaft can rotate continuously without any external power after an initial activation. The apparatus comprises a mechanical driving device, at least two coils, wherein the mechanical driving device includes arms in attachment with magnetic bodies, thereby an opposite electromotive force can be generated based on an electromagnetic induction to apply a force on the magnetic bodies for a rotation of the shaft. 07/27/05 - 'Perpetual' Motor invented in Russia The wonder motor is made of a few magnets and pieces of metal. "My device can operate even in space," said Mr. Strushchenko. He claims the military can put it to good use too. From his point of view, several motors run by magnets measuring 3m-4m in diameter will enable a submarine to operate for several decades without using any fuel. You can start up the motor by turning its handle. The motor will then produce the amount of energy that is a hundred times greater than that used for turning the handle. The two magnets do the trick. They are arranged in parallel. There are two blades overlapping the gap between the magnets once you turn the handle. The larger the magnet, the faster flywheel goes producing energy. It can produce a four-time greater amount of energy if the distance between is reduced by two times. The inventor says the handle and the flywheel can be linked together. Then you do not have to turn the handle. The motor will be running by itself. 07/27/05 - Controlled navigation in anti-gravity Canis Major dwarf galaxy is one of the closest galaxies to the earth and is colliding with our Milky Way. Our Milky Way is slowly and systematically taking away the stars from the Canis Major which is a much smaller galaxy. When simulated in a computer it shows very clearly how our Milky Way have systematically taken stars away from Canis Major and grown approximately 1% more in mass at the expense of the smaller galaxy. Simulations show that, over a period of two billion years, the stream of stars lost from the Canis Major dwarf galaxy are able to wrap around the galaxy three times, giving rise to a complex structure which is seen as a immense ring of stars from Earth. When the data was put in a knowledge base and the inference engine was asked to reverse engineer the model, it clearly showed how two gravitational sources can interact to transfer stars between them. It was absolutely astounding to note that the transfer is totally organized and controlled. The artificial intelligence system allows back calculating the model with which two colliding galaxies have interacted. They do not crash on each other, one is slowly absorbed by the other. It provided the first clue to controlled navigation within the realm of anti-gravity propagation. The collision of the two galaxies is slow speed motion picture of how anti-gravity propulsion systems can work. Now the challenge is to port the model to work for terrestrial aircrafts and spacecrafts. 07/27/05 - Text messages (SMS) to cellphones free from your PC Currently, Teleflip works only in North America (Canada, US, Caribbean, Hawaii, Guam). We are working on adding more countries soon. The next time you need someone to email you directions, a recipe, sales information, or maybe just a few sweet nothings... tell them to TELEFLIP™ it, at: (yourcellphonenumber)@teleflip.com 07/27/05 - Birth of the Optical Age Electro-optical modulators - devices which convert optical information into electrical, and vice versa - are used in thousands on the Internet. Ironically, inside the millions of personal computers, which connect to the Net, copper is still the preferred connection material, and today's processors which house nearly a billion transistors on a matchbox-sized slab of silicon, use micro-thin tracks of copper to carry the bits of data. The Raman Effect, which says light is tremendously amplified when passing through certain transparent materials, has been seized by these scientists to create what is known as the Raman silicon laser. 07/27/05 - Cooling Epilepsy The implant device then is activated to cool a small area of the brain from approximately 38°C (100°F) to 20°C (68°F) to render that part of the brain temporarily non-functional and seizure-free, according to researchers. 07/27/05 - Google Hybrid mode for maps Shows city street photos with names attached! Available in the US, Canada, and the UK. 07/27/05 - Earths magnetic field strong enough for measuring bio effects Researchers have discovered that the Earth's natural magnetic field is strong enough for some examinations. And this closes a gap. Because it makes measurement with magnetic fields outdoors and under difficult conditions possible for the very first time. Although the applications will not initially be used in the field of medicine, they will make chemical analyses possible, such as when examining oil directly at source. When measuring with magnets, researchers use a natural phenomenon, namely that nuclei spin like a top, a property appropriately called "spin". The spin can be focused in a magnetic field to generate typical signals, so-called nuclear magnetic resonance. As a rule, they need very strong artificially produced magnetic fields for such work. In experiments with the inert gas xenon, Helmholtz scientists were now able to show that under certain circumstances they can also use laser light to influence the spinning movement of the nuclei. In these cases, a weak magnetic field is already powerful enough for the analysis. Often, the Earth's natural magnetic field is even strong enough. By comparison, the Earth's magnetic field is around 20,000 times weaker than the field strengths used in these large pieces of equipment. 07/27/05 - IR Light plant scanner to determine vitality By firing rapid pulses of polarized light at corn, spinach and other crops, researchers have uncovered a picture of plant health that is invisible to the naked eye. Using a portable light source and detector technology, the researchers can differentiate minute differences in leaf colors - indicators of over- or under-fertilization, crop-nutrient levels and perhaps even disease. The N-Checker (for "nitrogen-checker") apparatus will help farmers determine in real time how much fertilizer to apply. By preventing waste, the system could decrease the cost of crop production and dramatically cut the nitrogen-laden runoff responsible for algal blooms and other damage to wetlands and waterways. 07/27/05 - Around the moon for 100 million (For 20 million, we could DISCOVER gravity control and use it - JWD) Following in the footsteps of two wealthy space tourists who each paid 20 million dollars for their week-long trips using the Russian space facilities, now they offer a 2 week vacation, around the moon and a stop at the international space station for a paltry 100 million dollars. 07/26/05 - Power from Lightning By using a nitro laser (a ten-year-old, inexpensive technology), Livingstone causes ionization in the air. This creates a pathway of lower resistance for a lightning bolt to travel along, thus directing it to the receiving end of his capturing apparatus. Livingstone says: "The strike is then sent through an 'electronic breakwater' to make the strike more manageable when the electricity comes out the other end. It can then be electrolyzed into hydrogen and oxygen or stored in a high-voltage capacitor array." Between E-bay and the local junkyard, Livingstone guesses that he has invested somewhere around $500 US in his two prototypes, including the two nitro lasers. He uses a 35 kilovolt nitro laser to trigger the artificial lightning bolt of electricity on his proof-of-concept prototype. Waiting in the wings is a 100 kV nitro laser he plans to use to trigger real lightning, creating the "conveyor belt" to direct the cloud to release its lightning discharge into his collection apparatus. In the future, when adequate research and development funding is obtained, "a more suitable tool would be a free electron laser", he said. When his website is ready to launch, it will be located at TheAmandaProject.com. 07/26/05 - Biomass powers generator The technology is robust, thirty times cheaper than solar energy, entails less maintenance cost and can be augmented at any given time, said Ajit Bharthuar. Biomass gasifier has the potential to produce 10 KW of power per day. It burns twigs in a controlled fashion to produce carbon monoxide and hydrogen, which when blend together produce gas for running the generator. The generator is fed with one kg of wood per hour to produce one kilo watt energy per hour. As the village is lit for six hours in the evening, roughly 60 kg of wood is consumed per day. Thanks to the technology, he said, all the 60 families are enjoying quality power without fluctuation and transmission losses. The extra power generated is being used for irrigation. Villagers have been trained to operate and maintain the generator. 07/26/05 - 'www.' in Hebrew is 666 or Mark of the Beast Just too strange not to post - JWD 07/26/05 - Reality mining via cellphone (A new form of profiling using predictive behaviors - JWD) Our research agenda takes advantage of the increasingly widespread use of mobile phones to provide insight into the dynamics of both individual and group behavior. By leveraging recent advances in machine learning we are building generative models that can be used to predict what a single user will do next, as well as model behavior of large organizations. Mobile phones (and similarly innocuous devices) are used for data collection, opening social network analysis to new methods of empirical stochastic modeling. "Given enough data, Eagle's algorithms were able to predict what people -- especially professors and Media Lab employees -- would do next and be right up to 85 percent of the time." 07/26/05 - American Airlines saving money by inhouse ingenuity (I love rigging things to save money, I did it for 3 companies, they called it 'Deckerizing' but saved tens of thousands per year, for me, NADA - JWD) Two American Airlines mechanics didn't like having to toss out $200 drill bits once they got dull. So they rigged up some old machine parts - a vacuum-cleaner belt and a motor from a science project - and built "Thumping Ralph." It's essentially a drill-bit sharpener that allows them to get more use out of each bit. The savings, according to the company: as much as $300,000 a year. on a tip from a maintenance crew, engineer Blakle Burgess came up with a way to save 90 percent On bathroom mirrors when they need to be replaced. Instead of ordering them prefabricated, Ms. Burgess helped design a way to make them on site with far cheaper raw materials. That way, when maintenance needs to replace a mirror, they can make it without having to go through the process of ordering and waiting for one to be delivered. 07/26/05 - Solar Stirling concentrator for power generation Mirrored surfaces are aimed directly at the sun, twisting a few inches every six seconds to track it across the sky. Each dish focuses the equivalent of 10,000 suns’ worth of heat on an eight-inch-wide maze of thin metal tubing perched above the dish’s center. The most common approach is to use sunlight to knock electrons out of a semiconducting material like silicon, creating an electric current. But the efficiency of even the very best photovoltaic systems, as the approach is called, tops out around 15%-in other words, 85% of the sunlight’s energy is wasted. Big, expensive solar panels in very sunny areas produce relatively little power, which winds up costing about 25 cents per kilowatt hour of electricity. (A kilowatt is about enough to power 14 - 75 watt bulbs.) Electricity from a conventional natural-gas-burning power station, by contrast, costs about seven cents per kilowatt hour. Instead of using rays of sunlight to knock out electrons, the dish reflects and concentrates the rays in order to heat and thus expand a gas. That expansion is then put to work by a device called a Stirling engine to turn a conventional electric generator. The approach is nearly twice as efficient as most photovoltaic systems-while doing away with semiconductors and other expensive materials. These solar dishes are the world’s great hope for renewable energy, says Slawson. 07/25/05 - Super efficient new windmill rotor While conventional turbines rotate on a horizontal axis, the V-shaped Aerogenerator, which would be as tall as the London Eye, spins on a vertical axis, like a record. At three revolutions per minute, one machine could generate up to nine megawatts of electricity, compared with an average of 2Mw from conventional turbines. The Aerogenerator is descended from what's known as a Darrieus rotor, which resembles an egg whisk in shape, and works something like a sideways water wheel. Unlike horizontal-axis designs, vertical-axis turbines can harness wind energy from any direction, and because the moving parts and the generator are at ground level, they are easier to maintain. Battle and others like him are thinking beyond mere environmental responsibility to an era where buildings, and ultimately cities themselves, are net energy producers. "Traditional buildings have been a drain on infrastructure - water, electricity, waste disposal, etc," says Battle. "Really we should be working towards something like an occupied infrastructure, just like windmills were once occupied. It's a paradigm shift in how we see buildings, and it means that architects are going to have to rethink their aesthetic. It's no longer about just responding to cultural and social urban factors. It's a whole different layer of architecture coming through that will begin to change the face of our cities." 07/25/05 - Plasma converts garbage to road construction material The City of Ottawa is looking to turn your garbage into material for road construction. City Manager Kent Kirkpatrick says the city is exploring new technology to destroy garbage with heat and create electricity at the same time. Plasco Energy Group is exploring using a plasma generator to create extreme heat to break down the waste into synthetic gases, heat and slag. It would then use power turbines and leave a gravel-like substance as a final product which could be used in road construction. 07/25/05 - Sonic Fusion device to generate power from heat Acoustic inertial confinement fusion (AICF) Sound waves bombard a liquid to create tiny void "bubbles" or "cavities." The bubbles grow and collapse violently to generate a flash of light and enormous heat, which create the conditions for fusion. The neutrons from the Thermo-Electron's generator "seed" the bubble formation in the liquid. The neutrons from this new generator will trigger the fusion process in an IDI reactor. These "trigger" neutrons are emitted in a narrow pulse that lasts a few microseconds, and the generator assures that absolutely no neutrons are produced between pulses, which is critical for IDI's application. When this neutron output is zero, the only detectable neutrons will come from acoustic fusion, which is what IDI wants to measure. 07/25/05 - NASA investigating Antimatter engine Imagine having a supply of positrons - what could you do with them? According to Gerald A. Smith, Principle Investigator for Positronics Research, LLC of Sante Fe, New Mexico you could go just about anywhere, "the energy density of antimatter is ten orders of magnitude greater than chemical and three orders of magnitude greater than nuclear fission or fusion energy." And what does this mean in terms of propulsion? "Less weight, far, far, far less weight." According to Dr. Smith, "for many years physicists have squeezed positrons out of the tungsten targets by colliding the positrons with matter, slowing them down by a thousand or so to use in high resolution microscopes. This process is horribly inefficient; only one millionth of the positrons survive. For space travel we need to increase the slowing down efficiency by at least a factor of one thousand. After four years of hard work with electromagnetic traps in our labs, we are preparing to capture and cool five trillion positrons per second in the next few years. Our long-range goals are five quad-trillion positrons per second. At this rate we could fuel up for our first positron-fueled flight into space in a matter of hours." 07/25/05 - The 'Avto Effect' to improve electron work function A new method for increasing electron emission from thin film materials may provide much improved materials for constructing vacuum diodes and similar components, and, in turn, allow for greater efficiency in a wide range of industrial processes, including power generation and heat management. The preparation involves changing the geometry of the surface of the film by etching tiny grooves or corrugations on it. As a result, quantum wave interference reveals new electronic characteristics which were previously unobserved. One of the first effects to be observed has been a change in the material's "work function," the amount of work needed to cause electron emission. In repeated tests, the material's work function has been markedly lowered, allowing electrons to flow more freely into the vacuum. 07/25/05 - Cow Manure Methane converted to Electricity The $900,000 system, known as an anaerobic plug-flow digester, was financed in part by a $244,000 state grant and a $150,000 federal grant. Fourteen dairies in California have received a total of $6 million in grants to build the methane digesters. Only nine dairy farms outside the state have them now, Marsh said. With 500 cows at their Lakeside dairy, the Van Ommerings have plenty of raw material for their digester. Each cow produces about 80 pounds of waste each day, or almost 15 tons a year. The manure is carted to a concrete-lined, 130-foot-long holding tank covered with a polyethylene tarp. It stews for about 30 days while bacteria creates a gas that is funneled to a generator producing more than 100 kilowatts of electricity, enough to power more than 100 homes. Dave Van Ommering said a key to the operation is ensuring the manure is maintained at about 100 degrees, the optimum temperature for the bacteria. It puts a whole new spin on those California milk commercials featuring happy cows. 07/25/05 - Seeking Positive Deviance (Living in Mexico, I've seen this often and puzzled at why it is allowed to exist in such a wealthy world - JWD) More than 1 billion people live on less than a dollar a day-and while their gnawing, chronic poverty has none of the drama of a tsunami or the terror of an Ebola epidemic, it is ugly and horrific and chips away daily at human dignity and aspirations. In many developing countries, the idea of sending a child to school beyond the third grade is a luxury beyond imagination. Many people around the world live in chronic pain, hundreds of millions of them with no access to medical services. At its worst, poverty means living without recourse to ways of redressing inequities and injustice. In essence, it means having little to no control over anything in your life. Templates trucked in from other cultures-that are not based on the value system, traditions, taboos, and strengths of the specific culture or community-will fall short. A onesize- fits-all approach can’t win the fight against global poverty. External resources that had led to improvements were no longer accessible; the implementing agency had come, fed, and left- changing very little. The Vietnamese villagers had been passive beneficiaries, neither encouraged nor required to change any of the behaviors that led to malnutrition. Using the PD approach, we can seek out and find good changes that are already evolving in a population, and then, instead of waiting for the fittest to survive into the next generation, the evolutionary advance can be amplified immediately, speeding the capacity of the population to ease its own suffering. 07/25/05 - Information rain A projector on a tall tripod shows images of raindrops hitting the ground and making ripples, in hopes that people will enter the "rainy" area and hold out their palms. A camera tracks the entrants' movements and sends the data to connected computers. Then the projector shoots out a round-shaped advertisement -- which can post words such as "SALE" -- right onto their hands. "It's quite natural that you hold out your palm when it starts raining," said Yoko Ishii, a chief researcher in the human interaction project. 07/25/05 - Maggots used to save diabetic foot Diagnosed with diabetes 40 years ago and subsequently lost her left leg to the disease. She also suffers from neuropathy, meaning she has no feeling in her foot or leg, and ulcers or wounds can develop from constantly putting pressure on the foot. For the procedure, the maggots - about 2 millimeters each in size - are placed on the wound, then surrounded by an adhesive foam, clear tape, and a gauze bandage. By July 8, the maggots had swelled to twice their normal size and eaten away part of the infection. When Dowling removed the bandages two days later, Enser's foot was looking better. Healthy, pink skin was replacing the dead tissue, and the swelling was down in her foot and ankle. The maggots do more than just clean a wound. They also dissolve the infected tissue, kill bacteria and leave an enzyme behind that stimulates healing. They will only eat the infected tissue, leaving healthy tissue alone. "In general, maggots have the capacity to distinguish viable and dead tissue on a cell-by-cell basis," said Dr. Steven M. Holland... 07/25/05 - Low Tech improved Rope Pump The Elephant Pump was adapted by Pump Aid from a 2000 year-old Chinese design. Water is drawn up a pipe by plastic washers attached to a loop of rope. As the handle is turned, the rope pulls each washer up through the pipe, lifting a column of water. The rope runs round a wheel at the top, down into the water and round a guide at the bottom of the well. The wheel is turned with the handle, lifting water up through the pipe. The Elephant Pump yields about one litre of clean water every second for an average well depth of 20 metres. 07/24/05 - Electric Shark Fence Researchers in South Africa and Australia have started work on an electric shield to protect swimmers from shark attacks. The shields emit an electric signal, which sharks do not like, so keeping them away from beaches. The shield would be placed about 400m out to sea and would be a string of electric emitters, each with a radius of about 3m. 07/24/05 - Halbach Arrays for Free Energy/Flight applications (Thanks to Chuck Knight for sharing this! - JWD) This magnet array seems frighteningly close to a magnetic monopole. It needs a slight push to initiate the effect. Maglev trains, motors and generators using circular Halbach arrays have already been patented--the advantages include minimized drag from eddy current effects (drag decreases as speed increases), reduced power consumption (no giant electromagnets needed), reduced exposure of train passengers to high magnetic fields, and other things that we haven't even begin to explore yet. 07/24/05 - Forcefields for Astronauts Most of the dangerous radiation in space consists of electrically charged particles: high-speed electrons and protons from the Sun, and massive, positively charged atomic nuclei from distant supernovas. Like charges repel. So why not protect astronauts by surrounding them with a powerful electric field that has the same charge as the incoming radiation, thus deflecting the radiation away? A lunar base would have a half dozen or so inflatable, conductive spheres about 5 meters across mounted above the base. The spheres would then be charged up to a very high static-electrical potential: 100 megavolts or more. This voltage is very large but because there would be very little current flowing (the charge would sit statically on the spheres), not much power would be needed to maintain the charge. The spheres would be made of a thin, strong fabric (such as Vectran, which was used for the landing balloons that cushioned the impact for the Mars Exploration Rovers) and coated with a very thin layer of a conductor such as gold. The fabric spheres could be folded up for transport and then inflated by simply loading them with an electric charge; the like charges of the electrons in the gold layer repel each other and force the sphere to expand outward. 07/24/05 - Privatizing Space using Financial Incentives The goal: to loft people and cargo at one-tenth the current cost. Building reusable rockets is only the first step. In February, a dozen players formed the Personal Spaceflight Federation, which aims to set industry standards and help shape federal policies on privatized spaceflight. To some analysts, tourism is the fastest way to capitalize on personal spaceflight. 100 people have made reservations for tickets selling for $200,000 each. Bigelow has put up $50 million for America's Space Prize. The goal is to launch and return an empty vehicle capable of holding five people in an orbit some 249 miles above Earth, then repeat the task 60 days later with five people on board for two orbits. The deadline: Jan. 10, 2010, the year NASA's remaining shuttles are slated for retirement. 07/24/05 - Ultrasound speeds Potato growth Potatoes have been stimulated into earlier sprouting and blossoming, and larger tuber yields at maturity, by treating the seed pieces with "supersonic" waves-sound waves of such high frequency that they are far beyond the range of audibility. The experiments were performed at the high-frequency laboratory of the State X-Ray Institute in Moscow. The waves were produced by an electrically excited quartz crystal, operating in an oil bath, at a frequency stated to be about 400 million cycles a second. The uppermost limit of audible sound waves is only about 20,000 cycles a second. 07/24/05 - Plants and Gravity Everyone knows that plants grow toward light, but there must be more to it than that. Trees in northern forests, for example, grow straight up even though the Sun is never directly overhead, and the first stem emerging from a buried seed grows upward through dark soil. It's clear that gravity must play some role, too. Indeed, scientists know that the direction of gravity's pull is behind many plant behaviours, such as corn crops righting themselves after being flattened by a storm. What's unclear is exactly how plants "feel" gravity and respond to it. What part of a plant senses the direction of gravity's pull? And how is that pull translated into a chemical response that alters the plant's growth? 07/24/05 - 1871 Cook patent claims overunity In his patent, Mr. Cook writes, "My invention relates to the combination of two or more simple or compound helices and iron cores or magnets in such a manner as to produce a constant electric current without the aid of a galvanic battery." 07/24/05 - Earlier patent application for self-running engine (Also provided courtesy of Mike, thanks! - JWD) 07/23/05 - Hydrogen to run buses in Iceland Fuel cells that would have filled the space of several passenger seats five years ago are now small enough to fit in the roof panels. And out the exhaust pipe: a trickle of water. Electricity can in turn be used to make hydrogen. Passed through water, it strips the element out, allowing it to become usable fuel for buses or cars or anything else. You can imagine renewable systems elsewhere -- the solar panel on your roof, the windmill on the ridge -- making the clean electricity needed to produce hydrogen, but for a long time to come that clean electricity will be needed simply to displace the dirty electricity we're already making. (Years ago, Tewari told us they were using Homopolar generators to produce hydrogen which they used in Bombay buses, but actually combusting the gas in existing engines, no fuel cell/electric motor retrofit - JWD) 07/23/05 - Computer successfully 'predicted' crime Alerted to a pattern identified with the help of a computer, uniformed officers from the 3rd Precinct were keeping a close watch on South Broadway when they arrested two people accused of holding up a 25-year-old city woman. Lt. James McLaughlin, who is working in the Technical Support Unit to help police use computers to fight crime, evaluated robberies in southwest Yonkers and told the department there would be a robbery between 8 p.m. and midnight Wednesday on South Broadway. 07/23/05 - Oceans turning acid due to Pollution Carbon dioxide, a byproduct of human burning of fossil fuels such as coal and petroleum, turns water acidic. If carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise, researchers said ocean acidity could increase by the end of this century to a point at which oceans would be considered mildly acidic. The process has already begun, they added. “The oceans will become so acidic by 2100 it could threaten marine life in ways we can’t anticipate,” said Ken Caldeira, co-author of the report and scientist at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology in Stanford, California. 07/23/05 - DIY $20 Bike Rack Full details for a Great PVC project! 07/23/05 - Warmer = Sicker Many infectious diseases are dependent on vector organisms, which are sensitive to environmental factors and therefore will be affected by global warming. Biological modelling under various climate scenarios suggests a widening of the potential transmission zone of some disease-causing pathogens and their vectors, such as mosquitoes. 07/23/05 - Cute invention if you use WD-40! 07/23/05 - Bendable Concrete Flexible concrete might sound like a gimmick, but most concrete fails because it is brittle, so cracks develop over time, and eventually become catastrophic. U Michigan has reduced this brittleness to make a concrete "500 times more resistant to cracking and 40 percent lighter." They also say that for a typical application, it "is 37 percent less expensive, consumes 40 percent less energy, and produces 39 percent less carbon dioxide". 07/23/05 - Rural Innovations in India "The striking thing about grassroots innovations is that they are in response to a problem that the innovators feel themselves or see other people facing," says Anil Gupta of the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. 07/23/05 - High School kids build Peltier Air Conditioner for cars U.S. drivers use about 7.9 billion gallons of fuel each year to run their air-conditioners, which draw power from the engine. By adopting their contraption - which taps into the electrical system, using fans to blow hot air through five Peltier chips and then releasing cold air - they say the country stands to save 3.9 billion gallons of fuel annually, or about $10 billion based on current gas prices. Furthermore, the product would free drivers from Freon - which despite improvements, remains an ozone-depleting chemical in current air-conditioners. The Peltier chips, which they purchased on eBay for $9.99 each, have a life span of 20 to 30 years and an unfaltering cooling capacity. And like every component in the Space Beast, which can be minimized in size to about 2 inches in width, the chips are recyclable. 07/22/05 - Magnetic Shielding Materials For your self-running magnetic motor experiments, check out this page. Unlike X-rays, sound, light or bullets, magnetic field lines must travel from the North pole of the source and return to the South pole. Under usual circumstances, they will travel through air, which by definition has a permeability of "1". But if a material with a higher permeability is nearby, the magnetic field lines, efficient creatures that they are, will travel the path of least resistance (through the higher permeability material), leaving less magnetic field in the surrounding air. Here's how the permeabilities of some common materials compare: Air, Copper, Aluminum, Tin, and Lead are rated at 1. Nickel is 100, Commercial Iron and Stainless steel at 200. MagnetShield at 4000, Magnetic Shielding Alloys at 20,000+ and Annealed MetGlas 1,000,000. A source within the shield will produce field lines which will travel through the air immediately surrounding the North pole until they reach the shield. Then traveling through the shield, they will emerge into the air surrounding the South pole and back to the source. 07/22/05 - Personal Biodiesel story Entertaining article about converting to BioDiesel. Biodiesel, we were told by its many fervent fans, burns efficiently and reduces overall greenhouse gas emissions by using recycled ingredients. It can power most normal diesel engines, and it's usually very easy to procure; those willing to get a little greasy can even make batches of biodiesel in their backyards. While biodiesel cars arent as clean and green as, say, bicycles, they're a definite improvement on standard gasoline vehicles. The problem with biodiesel, we discovered, was finding an inexpensive diesel car. Make your own Biodiesel #1, Make your own Biodiesel #2 and of course there are many other pages showing how to do it. 07/22/05 - Molecular garbage attributes to Aging The theory holds that aging is the result of years of accumulated damage to molecules important for our bodies’ functioning. The molecules suffer damage largely as a result of power-generating structures in each cell called mitochondria, which-not unlike man-made power plants-can produce harmful chemicals in addition to life-sustaining energy. But these sweeping systems don’t operate with perfect efficiency. The result is an accumulation of damaged molecules that are under-efficient or altogether worthless-molecular “garbage.” According to the garbage-accumulation theory, this refuse builds up until it starts seriously getting in the way of cellular business, if not actively doing harm on its own. Eventually it reaches “a critical level incompatible” with life, Stroikin’s team wrote in a paper published in the January issue of the research journal Biogerontology. Stroikin and colleagues wrote that “accumulation of such biological ‘garbage’ seems to upset normal cellular functions, resulting in decreased adaptability and finally in cell death. Cell division is apparently a natural anti-ageing mechanism.” 07/22/05 - Rod Arrays focus sound Researchers from the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain have produced a pair of flat lenses that control soundwaves. The lenses could eventually be used in acoustic microscopes that use sound waves to examine the internal composition of objects and materials. They could also be used in non-invasive surgical tools like lithotripsy apparatus, according to the researchers. Lithotripsy is a medical procedure that uses ultrasound to pulverize kidney stones. The flat acoustic lenses are made of irregularly spaced arrays of aluminum cylinders. The design was produced by a tool that combines multiple scattering theory and a genetic algorithm, and is optimized to concentrate sound waves at a focal point. 07/22/05 - New Photo book compares 30 year old satellite photos with Today A newly published book of satellite photos shows stark differences in Earth three decades ago and today, as urban sprawl and environmental damage took their toll. The photos show dramatic images of rain forest deforestation in Paraguay and Brazil, rapid oil and gas development in Wyoming, United States, forest fires across sub-Saharan Africa and the retreat of glaciers and ice in polar and mountain areas. “Cities pull in huge amounts of resources including water, food, timber, metals and people,” he explained. “They export large amounts of wastes including household and industrial wastes, wastewater and the gases linked with global warming. Thus their impacts stretch beyond their physical borders affecting countries, regions and the planet as a whole.” 07/22/05 - Push for Renewable Energy Sources - seeking 10MW and lower sized plants Developers of the top ten best proposals to build power plants with a capacity of below 10 megawatts (MW) each will be invited to the Czech Republic and Spain to meet suppliers and banks, which may be interested in financing such projects, ACE's policy advisor to the executive director Terry Lacey said on Thursday. The competition targets power stations in Indonesia using new and renewable energy, including mini hydro plants, those that use biomass, solar energy, geothermal power and clean coal. 07/22/05 - Magnetics produces patterns in particles Researchers from Argonne National Laboratory have devised a way to use electric and magnetic fields to assemble magnetic microparticles into a wide variety of patterns, including clusters, rings, chains and networks. Particular shapes depend on the amplitude, or strength, and frequency, or vibration rate, of the magnetic field. In general, low-frequency magnetic fields make the microparticles form compact clusters, while high frequencies drive the microparticles into chains and net-like patterns. The researchers' method could also be used to organize biological particles like viruses and bacteria that are tagged with magnetic nanoparticles. This is one step toward biomedical tools that involve precisely controlling the propagation of bioparticles through capillaries, according to the researchers. 07/22/05 - $150 Gamma Ray Detector Using the patented design introduced by McGregor, McNeil, a K-State mechanical and nuclear engineering graduate student, simply wrapped Teflon and copper tape around a semiconductor block to improve the resolution of the gamma ray detector -- at a fraction of the cost of other techniques. The invention gives scientists an inexpensive way to reproduce the high-resolution detectors -- $150 instead of $5,000. 07/21/05 - Kozyrev paper with intriguing Aether effects in experiments Matter behaves somewhat like a sponge in water. If we do something to disturb the structure of the sponge, such as to squeeze it, spin it or vibrate it, then it will release some of its water back into its environment. Over the years, all of the following processes were discovered to create a “time flow” of torsion waves in the laboratory, due to their disruption of matter in some form: the deforming of a physical object, the encounter of an air jet with an obstacle, the operation of an hourglass filled with sand, the absorption of light, friction, burning, the actions of an observer, such as a movement of the head, the heating or cooling of an object, phase transitions in substances (frozen to liquid, liquid to vapor, etc.), dissolving and mixing substances, the fading death of plants, non-light radiation from astronomical objects, sudden changes in human consciousness. Kozyrev’s work showed that torsion fields can be absorbed, shielded or sometimes reflected. For example, sugar can absorb, polyethylene film and aluminum can shield, and other forms of aluminum or mirrors can reflect. Kozyrev found that in the presence of this energy flow, objects that are rigid and inelastic will show weight changes, whereas flexible, elastic objects will show changes in their elasticity and / or viscosity. Kozyrev also showed that the weight of a spinning top will change if it is vibrated, heated or cooled or if it has an electric current passed through it. As we can see, all of the above behaviors fit in quite nicely with our analogy of the “sponge” of matter absorbing or releasing small amounts of energetic “water”. It is important to remember that though the forces of torsion waves on matter are relatively small, they do exert a steady push. The strongest effects of the pressure of torsion waves would be a slight spiraling movement that is joined with gravity. You must create vibrations in the detecting object that will allow it to continually harness a three-dimensional, moving spiral of energy force. Kozyrev was able to capture the subtle pressure of the torsion waves by combining two different forms of vibration or movement at a time. 07/21/05 - Attach a 'Fuel Magnet' to increase your mileage Here's the theory... The liquid flows through the pipe past the magnet, and as it does so, its randomly oriented molecules are aligned by the strong unipolar magnetic field and retain their polarised state as they leave the vicinity of the magnet. The tube should be non-ferrous to avoid reducing the level of magnetic field applied to the liquid, and a metal plate should be applied to the back of the magnet to increase the strength of the field on the pipe side. Polarity of the magnet is not really important. 07/21/05 - Extending Fuel Efficiencies I was led to this by mention of the Oglemobile which claimed in excess of 100mpg, check it out, a lot of info worth diggin into on this page. 07/21/05 - Hard Drive failure monitor If you've ever had a surprise hard drive failure like I've had several times, this could warn you in advance. Free DiskCheckup displays the current values of the SMART attributes, along with the Threshold value for that attribute. If any attribute value is close to or below the threshold, the drive is no longer reliable and should be replaced. Note that SMART attributes change slowly over time and are helpful when diagnosing the life span of a particular drive. DiskCheckup also displays some additional drive information, such as the drive serial number, model number, the number of cylinders, tracks, the sectors per track, etc. 07/21/05 - Free Energy demonstration claimed Thanks Levi for sending this intriguing URL with claims of possibly tapping into ZPE or earth's magnetic field. The writer says he saw and tested self-running devices that power useful loads which can be built for less than $50 per module. Uses only wires, no capacitors or control electronics. Sounds like Marks or another guy years ago who claimed to be able to control local temperature with just coils of wire tuned to the building. If this is real, could it be the 'perpetual batteries' we have been seeking for so many years? Unfortunately, it was posted in May 2005 on a conspiracy blog, thats a bad sign right off the bat. Of course, no trackable information and rampant paranoia. 07/21/05 - New control system for personal windpower In the lab, Knight's team put together a computer control and a DC motor to simulate what would happen outside, tweaking the setup to work in a light breeze. They say a real system could be built based on their results using simple and inexpensive components. "Our research focus was the development of the simple control scheme to expand the operating range of the generator," Knight told LiveScience. Current small-scale wind energy generators cost about $2,400 (U.S.), Knight and his colleagues determined. On an average day of wind, one can produce 5.2 kilowatt-hours per day. According to Natural Resources Canada, the average household consumes between 34 and 67 kilowatt-hours per day.Most small-scale generators require wind speeds of at least 11 mph (18 kilometers per hour) to generate any power, the scientists say. The new device would work with winds of just 6 mph (10 kph). 07/21/05 - Major Desalination plant to relieve Western Australian water needs Like a giant vacuum cleaner, the plant will suck hundreds of millions of litres from the ocean and, through a process known as reverse osmosis, turn the salty liquid into drinking water. It works by forcing the water through a membrane, which lets clean water through but stops salts, viruses and microorganisms at the gate. "The biggest advantage is membrane technology gives you very clean water 100% of the time, and you can turn it on and off." 07/21/05 - Plug-in Hybrids use house electrical power to recharge The "Prius+" boasts that the modified car can deliver upward of 100 miles per gallon under the right driving conditions. A standard Prius gets about 55 miles per gallon, according to Toyota. During normal operation, the Prius' main computer determines the most efficient way to operate the vehicle, usually running the gasoline and electric engines simultaneously. When a Prius driver brakes, the car's electric motor becomes a generator, creating electricity that is stored in a battery pack, which is later used by the electric motor. The CalCar team thought it might be more efficient to charge the Prius' batteries using power from the grid. Such a modification would allow Prius drivers to take local trips at low speeds using only battery power, without burning any gas at all. 07/20/05 - Electromagnetic radiation from stressed rocks EM Earthquake Detection? "It has been demonstrated by the sample rock experiments that the ordinary crustal rocks produced electricity when they were shocked or fractured and radiated EM waves in the frequency range of 10 Hz to 100 kHz. The electric dipole moment to radiate the EM waves was estimated to be 10-14 C m." 07/20/05 - Rapid Epilepsy Seizure relief from oral ingestion Doctors evaluated how successful each treatment was at stopping the seizures within 10 minutes and sustaining the seizure-free state for at least an hour. The mouth treatment, which used the liquid tranquiliser midazolam, worked twice as well as the rectal approach, which used liquid diazepam, or Valium. The mouth treatment was successful in 61 out of 109 cases, or 57 percent of the time, while the rectal infusion worked in 30 out of 110 cases, or 27 percent of the time. The mouth treatment also kicked in more quickly and lasted longer, the study found. 07/20/05 - Termite Guts Termite guts take indigestible cellulose, which makes up the bulk of all plant material grown on earth, and convert it to ethanol, which even today is a versatile and popular fuel. The majority of all plant matter is cellulose - a solid, low-grade fuel about as futuristic as burning wood. If scientists can convert cellulose into liquid fuels like ethanol, the world's energy supply and storage problems could both be solved at a stroke. This is where the termite guts come in. A billion years of evolution have produced a highly efficient factory for turning cellulose into ethanol, unlike anything which humans can yet design. By exploiting these tricks, says Chu, we can use biology as a solution to a pressing world problem. 07/20/05 - Electriplast - plastic that acts like metal Composed of different types of metal and plastic, electriplast acts like metal but it can be molded or extruded like plastic. Electriplast advantage: It reduces the cost of manufacturing because it is easier to mold and is lighter than metal. Its use in airplanes could make them more efficient; it could make cellphones smaller. "It reduces 50 percent of the part count because you can do more with molding," Aisenbrey said. "If you are building 4 million parts, and saving 3 to 4 cents a part, that becomes a big chunk of change. It is 40 percent less weight than aluminum and 80 percent less than copper." 07/20/05 - 'Wind Wandler' Novel Turbine Windmill for better efficiencies A wind turbine that is helical instead of bladed is proving to be quieter, more efficient, and does not have to have its blades feathered or be stopped in high winds. Coupled with eddy current couplings to turn flywheels, developed by an inventions company on the other side of the world, these devices can be used to deliver power or torque relatively evenly, despite variations in wind speed. The helical wind turbine has been given the name the 'Wind Wandler' and was developed by a small German company called MatroW based in Ladenburg, which is between Heidelberg and Mannheim. When the turbine is operating at high speed, the turbine not only turns the load but also increases the flywheel speed through the eddy current coupling. However, when the flywheel is going faster than the turbine, the flywheel continues to turn the load through the eddy current coupling, but the mechanical clutch is disengaged so that it does not try to turn the turbine as well. Coupling the flywheel through an eddy current coupling greatly reduces peak loads on input and output shafts and gears. 07/20/05 - Paris 'space' cuisine Chefs originated gourmet, tasty dishes using only rice, onions, tomatoes, soybeans, potatoes, lettuce, spinach and wheat. The final ingredient was the freshwater blue-green algae Spirulina, an excellent source for the energy required in the extreme situations astronauts are liable to encounter on Mars. "We are aiming initially at locally producing 40 percent of astronauts' food on future long-duration space missions, for example to Mars," says Christophe Lasseur, ESA's biological life-support co-ordinator responsible for recycling and production of air, water and food for long-term space missions. "By growing enough plants to cover around 40 percent of what we eat, we also get 'for free' the oxygen and water needed to live", Lasseur said. Currently, all the food eaten by astronauts in space is brought from Earth, but this will not be possible on longer missions. 07/19/05 - British Scientists develop 'antigravity' British scientists have developed an antigravity machine that can float heavy stones, coins and lumps of metal in mid-air. Based around a powerful magnet, the device levitates objects in a similar way to how a maglev train runs above its tracks. The device exploits diamagnetism (repels both North and South poles equally). Place non-magnetic objects inside a strong enough magnetic field and they are forced to act like weak magnets themselves. Generate a field that is stronger below and weaker above, and the resulting upward magnetic force cancels out gravity. 07/19/05 - Companies paying workers to buy Fuel Efficient cars 07/19/05 - The REAL Cost of Fossil Fuels What is the price you pay to purchase a gallon of gasoline for your car? Depending on what part of the country you live in, it is probably between $1.50 and $2.00 per gallon. But is this the “real cost” of the gasoline? True, it is the actual price you paid at the gas pump. But is it the total “real cost” that you and all of us are paying for our continued dependence on fossil fuels? I think not. There are a number of “hidden” costs that most of us do not realize. It is not obvious but we are quietly paying these additional costs every day. These additional indirect costs actually make the “real” cost of the gasoline many times higher than it seems at first glance. 07/19/05 - A Problem with Wind Power The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) aims to see 5% of our electricity produced by wind turbine in 2010. Energy companies are eagerly investing in wind power, finding the arrangement quite profitable. A little research, however, reveals that wind power does not in fact live up to the claims made by its advocates, that its impact on the environment and people's lives is far from benign, and that with such a poor record and prospect the money spent on it could be much more effectively directed. 07/19/05 - Twike Electric Micro-Car The Twike is a lightweight (~500-800 lbs.) three-wheel, two seat vehicle. It comes in two models, and both feature electric motors able to take the car up to 130 kilometers at speeds up to 85 kilometers per hour -- not quite freeway speeds, but more than enough for major roads and thoroughares. Like most modern electrics, it has regenerative braking to help recharge the battery, but can be "refilled" from a standard outlet. The main drawback of the Twike (aside from the difficulty of getting one in North America) is the price: while exact current prices are elusive, Twikes appear to run in the $17,000-$20,000 range. 07/19/05 - Technorati Blog Search Keep up with the pulse of the world, search 13.6 million blogs for the latest info and discussions. 07/19/05 - Circadian Rhythms affect drug/medicine effectiveness The toxicities of many commonly used anticancer drugs depend upon when they are administered during the day. This phenomenon occurs in humans and other animals. The effect is not trivial but "profound." (Hrushesky, W.J.M.; "Circadian Timing of Chemotherapy," Science, 228:73, 1985.) Comment. This "profound" effect should, by extrapolation, also apply to drug potency, the workings of the immune system, and all biochemical reactions. The location of and reason for the circadian clock are matters of conjecture. 07/19/05 - MineBurner destroys land mines for less than 20 cents per mine The device uses oxygen with liquid petroleum gas to provide a high temperature cutting flame that burns through the case of a landmine and ignites its contents. With the MineBurner, the disposal cost per landmine is less than 20 cents as against a United Nations estimate of between $300 dollars and $1,000 dollars with other devices. "The high explosive main charge will not detonate through heat and simply burns out," he said. 07/19/05 - Laser to help stop smoking The treatment, which involves three sessions lasting an hour each over three consecutive days, helps people cope with withdrawal symptoms. An invisible laser beam stimulates energy points on the ears, nose, hands and wrists, helping to promote the release of endorphins, the body's own pain relievers. The results help counter the sudden drop in endorphin levels smokers experience when they quit. The treatment has no known side-effects. 07/19/05 - Read what the world thinks about America The stories offer a glimpse of how foreigners feel about the only superpower. The website, launched earlier this year that simply culls, without comment, the foreign online press for commentary about America. Each article, posted within a day, has an English translation and a link to the original, for those fluent in foreign tongues. 07/18/05 - Measuring your power consumption Have you ever wondered how much power that microwave takes to pop that bag of popcorn? What about your toaster or coffee maker? How much power does that 'energy efficient' refrigerator actually use? And does it really make a difference if you turn all those lights off all the time? The problem with wondering about this stuff is there isn't really much you can do to measure it. Sure you can use a meter to measure an individual device here and there, but what does your whole house look like? About a year ago I was hired to develop a web based power monitoring application for data centers. The application was designed to monitor thousands of individual branch circuits using current transducers at the breaker panels. Among other things, the data logging requirments were to provide one year of min/max/mean measurement data with one minute resolution per circuit. Since I had all the hardware for testing, I figured what better way to test things than to install it in my own home. Kill-a-Watt circuit power meter - The price is definitely much better than professional units; you can find them for under $30. I bought one, and have found it quite easy to use and very informative. Plug the appliance you want to check into the front, plug the Kill A Watt into the wall, and the system will show you how much power you're using. The kilowatt/hour + time readout makes it easy to figure out your annual draw for appliances.. 07/18/05 - A Cracked Crystal spawned silicon semiconductors (A bit of fascinating history - JWD) To get a signal, an operator would search the surface of a crystal with a metal strand for the "hot spot," which caused current flow in only one direction. Early in 1940 Russell Ohl examined a silicon sample that had a crack down its middle. Something was strange about that crystal: when it was exposed to light, the current flowing between the two sides of the crack jumped significantly. The researchers discovered that the crack was a dividing line between two impurities in the silicon. One type of silicon had an excess of electrons, the other a deficit. They named them p-type for positive and n-type for negative, and the barrier between the two was dubbed the p-n junction. Gradually, the group realized that photons give the excess electrons in the n-type material enough of an energy boost to cross the junction and produce a current. 07/18/05 - Psoriasis Cure Psoriasis is a genetic condition that causes the over-production of skin cells, which causes a thickening of the skin, resulting in the raised, red, scaly patches. "Dithranol is a very effective treatment for episodes of psoriasis and it has been around for a long time, since the early 1900s. By studying the action of the drug, we wanted to gain a better understanding of how it works." Laboratory studies showed that dithranol targets skin cells' mitochondria - the part of a cell from which it draws its energy - causing the cells to die within 48 hours of the application of the ointment. 07/18/05 - Aether and Symmetry Braking What exactly is this underlying symmetry of nature that is broken by the aether? How is it broken, and how might it be restored? The symmetry in question is called chiral symmetry, and it involves the behavior of quarks, the principal constituents of the protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei (among other things). Quarks also, like the more familiar photons, have an intrinsic spin. If the spin axis is aligned with the direction of motion, then the sense of the rotation defines a handedness, known as chirality, rather like a left- or right-handed screw. The two possible states of chirality of a quark, left and right, are essentially the same concept as left and right circular polarization for photons. Thus, perfectly empty space, devoid of quarks, is unstable. One can lower the energy of the vacuum by filling it with bound uL-R and dL-R pairs (and their antiparticles, L-uR, L-dR). Physicists call this process the formation of the chiral condensate. In the stable state that finally results, the conservation of chirality is rendered ineffective, as space itself has become a reservoir containing, for example, an indefinite number of uL-quarks.[3-5] 07/18/05 - Letters to the Editor - Cleaning up the mess, is isolationism the only way? Cut off ALL aid...keep ALL of our money and bring home ALL of our troops, let EVERYONE ELSE make their own way, follow the Prime Directive - NON-INTERFERENCE! Don't mess with the bull - Deplorable "incidents" in London? We "protest" the actions of these "militants" and so on and on. I have the solution. Color me a blue-blooded American. Bring all our troops home no matter where they are stationed. Line our borders. Mess with us just once and Mecca disappears. Next goes Medina. If that is not enough then how about Damascus, Teheran, Saudi Arabia. The only thing these killers understand is power. Lets get some backbone and say enough is enough. As the saying goes, "mess with the bull, you get the horns." - Dale Davis Drastic action needed - ...Only a drastic, Emergency Powers Act, requiring every human being in the U.S. to be screened, with all Muslims and Middle-East foreign nationals deported or isolated, could possibly save us now. - Art Drexler Red herring - Someone needs to enlighten the public about what is really happening concerning the world's so-called attempt to stop terror. I believe terror is being used to allow laws to be created to force citizens to give up freedom in the name of security. - David Lamon 07/18/05 - NASA does about face, Moon FIRST, Mars second, YAAAYYYY! (Logic and common sense finally prevails for how best NASA can learn about utilization of space, maybe Bush reads KeelyNet? - JWD) "Today we set a new course for America's space program," Bush said then. "We will build new ships to carry man forward into the universe, to gain a new foothold on the moon, and to prepare for new journeys to worlds beyond our own ... We will then be ready to take the next steps of space exploration: human missions to Mars and to worlds beyond." 07/17/05 - Plastic Solar cells last 2.5 years Interesting info about solar cells. The market price for a silicon cell is up to 5,000 kroner (US$800, euro675) per square meter, while a plastic cell of the same size costs less than 100 kroner (US$15, euro13), they said. However, plastic cells have relatively low efficiency as they only exploit 0.2 percent to 5 percent of the sun's energy, compared with 12 percent to 15 percent for silicon cells. "There's a huge demand for solar cells, and the silicon cell producers can't meet the strong demand. With the new increased durability, plastic solar cells should soon be competitive and appear on the market," Krebs said. "People could for example have a strip of plastic solar cells on their mobile phones instead of a battery." 07/17/05 - Electronic newspaper of the future No doubt you've seen the roll out organic video screens in various movies. This looming iPod type reader is pretty slick. "Electronic paper reflects light off its white background making it easy to read outdoors, in bright light and at virtually any angle. "Many people looking at a laptop all day get very sore, tired eyes and this is an attempt to stop this. It is cheap and flexible. For instance, if you drop your laptop there may be serious damage but if one of our display screens falls to the ground it will be fine. "Also carrying a laptop around isn't very convenient. So it can definitely compete in that market." "Many new applications can be opened up from this including interactive posters, greetings cards and electronic books. It has the potential to replace newspapers, but one of the biggest problems we have is that people like the feel of handling a book or newspaper. "They have told us that they would prefer two A4 pages (open paperback book size) so they can flip one over as they would with a book, so that is something we are looking in to." 07/17/05 - Ground Source Heat Pumps save energy This involves installing underground tubing to serve as the heat sink (cooling side) of a heat pump to increase efficiency over just air circulation. For the winter of 2003-2004, from early October to early May I used 7620 kwh of electricity. That is equivalent to 26MBtu of natural gas. My heat pump has a coefficient of performance of 3.3, which means I needed 26 x 3.3 = 85 MBtu of heat for the winter. In order to obtain that amount of heat from a 95% efficient natural gas furnace, I would have to purchase 85/.95 = 90 Mbtu of natural gas. 95% efficient is close to the tops in efficiency. Natural gas this last winter varied from $8.60 to $9.90 /MBtu. At $9.50, 90 MBtu is $850. The 7620 kwh of electricity at Xcel Energy's electric space heating rate of $0.054...../kwh would be $413. So I cut my heating bill in half. 07/17/05 - Bubble Fusion repeated Yiban Xu and Adam Butt say that firing sound waves into a beaker of deuterated acetone that has been "seeded" with neutrons produces tritium and further neutrons through the process of fusion. Sonoluminescence describes the process whereby bubbles in a liquid emit tiny flashes of light when they are forced to expand and collapse by sound waves. Some physicists believe that the pressures and temperatures inside the collapsing bubbles could be high enough to initiate nuclear reactions. If achieved, such fusion could lead to a new clean energy source. Xu and Butt exposed their beaker of acetone to the neutron source and then bombarded the liquid with ultrasound. The sound waves create tiny bubbles in the liquid, which then expand before imploding. As before, the duo say they have seen tritium as well as neutrons with the characteristic energy (in the 2.5 MeV range) for DD fusion reactions. When ordinary, undeuterated acetone is used, fusion products are not observed, they say. 07/17/05 - Manure as a filter In line with the prior article here about Human waste to produce Methane, check this out. Food animals in the United States produce 350 billion tons of manure each year. A lot of it returns to the fields as fertilizer, but not all -- not by a long shot. Lima's team first "charred" the manure -- heated it in an oxygen-free environment to boil off volatiles and pollutants, leaving a carbon-rich, charcoallike residue. Then the team bombarded the residue with steam, imparting porosity to give it a large amount of surface with which to catch impurities. Lima said that most activated carbons are made from coal, wood or plant "residuals" such as peanut shells, soybean hulls or coconut husks, and are best used in removing odor and organic materials from drinking water. Unlike these products, chicken manure turns out to have an unusual ability to extract from industrial wastewater positively charged metal particles such as zinc, copper and cadmium, many of which are carcinogens. 07/16/05 - New Time Travel theory doesn't use exotic processes or materials Suppose a person spends a year in a rocket that's traveling slightly less than the speed of light. Because motion at such enormous speeds drastically slows the clock for the traveler, that person could return to Earth to find that many years had elapsed at home. In that way, a traveler could leap into the future. The theory shows that gravity curves space-time and slows clocks. That's why time-travel theorists have proposed that regions of space-time might naturally, or by human intervention, be made to curve back onto themselves. Someone moving around such a loop could travel back in time. 07/16/05 - Leedskalnin's Coral Castle Code REVEALED Quite fascinating page with many experiments done by the author showing his interpretation of what Ed Leedskalnin was trying to tell everyone as revealed in his coded messages and drawings. Definitely check this out! 07/16/05 - Microbial fuel cells makes electricity and treats wastewater A microbial fuel cell which he calls an upflow microbial fuel cell (UMFC) that is fed continually and, unlike most microbial fuel cells, works with chambers atop each other rather than beside each other. Angenent has created electricity with the device - in its current mode, about the size of a thermos bottle - and says it has to be scaled up considerably to someday handle the two million or so gallons of wastewater it needs to treat to churn out enough power. "We have proven we can generate electricity on a small scale," Angenent said. "It will take time, but we believe the process has potential to be used for local electricity generation. "We are doing basically the same thing as is done in a hydrogen fuel cell with our microbial fuel cell," said Angenent, whose graduate student, Jason He has done all the research on the process. "We've found that the bacteria on the anode electrode can act as the catalyst instead of platinum," "The bacteria form a biofilm on the anode electrodes, and what I want to do is optimize this process so that we get higher currents, which should allow us to scale up the system,' Angenent said. 07/16/05 - Hearing via Acoustic Holograms Humans and the higher primates can locate the source of a sound without turning their ears or heads. A new theory suggests our ear itself is a sound emitter. It emits a reference sound that combines with incoming sound to form an interference pattern inside the ear. The nature of this pattern is sensitive to the direction of the incoming sound. Our ear's cochlea detects and analyzes this pattern as if it were an acoustic hologram. The brain then interprets this data and infers the direction of the sound. 07/16/05 - Customized Nikes I love it when you get lots of options. The Publishing on demand is similar and I suspect many companies will be doing this as time goes on. A set of choices you can mix and match to your own needs/taste. - NikeID.com, the Web site where you can design a one-of-a-kind shoe using dozens of colors and fabrics. Candy-apple low-tops with a lime-green swoosh? Caramel trainers with your initials embroidered on the back? Dream up combinations from the colors offered, click until you've got it right, and custom-made shoes can be delivered to your doorstep in about three weeks -- for only $10 or so more than their non-customized counterparts. 07/16/05 - Shrimp bandages clot blood instantly Scientists have created a bandage that is actually able to clot a bullet wound in less than a minute. The bandages are laced with a mixture of ground shrimp shells and vinegar, a concoction that has been found to clot blood instantly. The key ingredient in the shrimp shells is called chitosan. Chitosan interacts with our blood cells because its molecules carry a positive charge. “The outer membrane of a red blood cell has a negative charge," he explains, "and opposite charges attract. The red cell is attracted to the positively-charged chitosan, and when it touches, it fuses and forms a blood clot.” When a clot forms, the bleeding stops. And unlike a regular bandage, which slips off when wet, the HemCon bandage becomes adhesive and sticks to the wet wound site, sealing and stabilizing it. 07/16/05 - Methane from human waste powers prison Rwanda's biogas facilities are among the most ambitious in the world, given their size and scope. They range up to 1,000 cubic meters in something resembling a beehive shape. The process requires putting a given amount of human or other animal waste into a "digester," which ferments it using bacteria to release methane gas that can be captured and then burned as fuel. Attached is a "compensating chamber" that replenishes the supply of bacteria to keep the operation self-sustaining. The lead engineer on the project, Ainea Kimaro, says that within four weeks, 100 cubic meters of waste can be transformed into 50 cubic meters of fuel. Once the methane is produced, the remaining waste is used as an odor-free fertilizer for the gardens at the prison. 07/16/05 - 3 Miles offshore - no laws! This would be GREAT for alternative medicine and many other activities subjected to overweaning, restrictive laws and regulations. What if American companies could get the benefits of outsourcing--cheap labor and long working days--without having to make the trip to Bangalore? If San Diego-based start-up SeaCode has its way, cheap code could be just a ferry ride away. The venture plans to anchor a cruise ship three miles off the coast of Los Angeles, filling it with programmers from around the world. They'll eat, sleep and work onboard, outside the reach of U.S. labor laws. U.S. labor law does not apply except on a U.S. flagship. The flag of the ship will provide the labor law -- more than likely [the ship will be registered in] Vanuatu, the Bahamas or Marshall Islands. 07/16/05 - G value in mines always higher Measurements of G, the constant in Newton's Law of Gravitation, made in mines are always significantly higher than those made in surface laboratories. No one is quite sure why. It has been suggested that a lack of knowledge of the densities of surrounding rocks might account for this discrepancy. 07/14/05 - Relaxin for orthodontics Modifying the body. "You can imagine normal collagen and elastin fibers to be like rubber bands that attach to the tooth to hold it in place," said Wheeler. "Those tissue fibers resist the force of the orthodontic treatment applied to move the tooth, and, when that force is removed, say when the braces are taken off, the elasticity of the tissues springs the tooth back into position." "Most of orthodontics has traditionally dealt with physics, the biomechanics of applying a force against a tooth to move it," said study investigator Timothy Wheeler, at UF's College of Dentistry. "Ours is the first study to use a naturally occurring hormone, recombinant human relaxin, to biochemically augment tooth movement and retention." Relaxin is a hormone that helps women's pelvic ligaments stretch in preparation for giving birth. 07/14/05 - Proposal for online Patent Review Called Peer to Patent, the proposal by Beth Noveck, director of New York Law School's Institute for Information Law and Policy, aims to relieve the current system, in which the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has a backlog of half a million cases. Noveck's plan would turn the review process over to tens or hundreds of thousands of experts in various fields who would collectively decide an application's fate via a massive rating system not unlike that of eBay. Under the plan, inventors who submit their work for peer review would be eligible for a 20-year patent. Inventors could also choose to use the existing system. However, in that case, patents would be granted for five years. Thus, Noveck argued, scientists would have an incentive to participate in the plan. 07/14/05 - Bypass Pointless Registration requirements You're browsing the web and you click a link to an article on a site (let's say nytimes.com) but instead of getting the article you get a screen asking you to login or register. Infuriated at the idea of pointlessly registering for yet another site you turn to your good buddy bugmenot.com 07/14/05 - Dans' Workshop neat place for photos and online free plans for many useful projects. 07/14/05 - Greek Pyramids to produce water 13 pyramids of loose limestone rocks that the Greeks constructed some 2500 years ago at Theodosia in the Crimea: The pyramids averaged nearly 40 feet high and were placed on hills around the city. As wind moved air through the heaps of stone, the day's cycle of rising and falling temperatures caused moisture to condense, run down, and feed a network of clay pipes. "One archaeologist calculated a water flow of 14,400 gallons per pyramid per day, based on the size of the clay pipes leading from each device." 07/14/05 - Methane from Garbage Methane - 20 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide - has to go somewhere: federal rules requires large landfills to either burn it or pipe it away to be processed. Voss is president of Arizona-based Methane Credit LLC , which this fall plans to start turning landfill methane into enough electricity to power 500 homes a year in rural Wayne County, 50 miles east of Raleigh. Methane is burned to fuel boilers that generate steam for heat processes, saving about half the price of natural gas. "It's a stable price," said Ajinomoto facilities manager Gary Faw. "It's not dependent on what goes on overseas." 07/13/05 - Notes on Personal Flight Some photos and ideas about the ability to free fly and move in any direction at will. 07/12/05 - Flying objects, flying men? Odd video footage showing what appears to be flying men. I have long believed that the ancients knew how to repel local gravity to fly freely at will. Maybe someone has now discovered how to do this? (thanks Monroe!) Also see; http://www.cropcircleanswers.com/FlyingHumanoid.htm and http://www.keelynet.com/greb/greb.htm 07/11/05 - Mitochondria as Midi-chlorians? Mitochondria are popularly seen as mere powerhouses within cells, with little influence on the organisms they inhabit. With only 37 genes in their arsenal, human mitochondria would not seem to pose any threat to humanity. After all, we have about 100,000 genes per cell. Of course, mitochondria do evolve separately from us, and this is a bit disconcerting. Mitochondria (with only 35 genes), it seems, can exercise vetoes over decisions by our own genome (with its 100,000± genes). Though helpfully supplying energy, mitochondria are mutating and evolving in ways to enhance their fitness rather than ours. Like so many true parasites, mitochondria will not shrink from modifying their hosts (us!) to achieve their ends 07/10/05 - Radiation Confusion and Aneuploidy as cause of Cancer Other than the atomic bomb survivor data, in fact, no data support the idea that typical exposures to radiation are dangerous. It was first noticed about a century ago that cancer cells exhibit “aneuploidy” - they don’t have the correct number of chromosomes. Aneuploidy occurs when cells divide improperly and a daughter cell winds up with an extra chromosome. An aneuploid cell may die, but it may also survive and repeat the error, perhaps eventually leading to cancer. The problem with this idea is not so much scientific as political. Bethell points out that the man who “rediscovered” the old work on aneuploidy is controversial University of California-Berkeley researcher and National Academy of Sciences member Peter Duesberg, who famously had his grants from the National Institutes of Health cut-off for being critical of the direction of AIDS research in the late-1980s. Duesberg still isn’t getting any NIH money even though his aneuploidy idea has survived early challenges, according to Bethell’s article, and the older notions of cancer development are going nowhere fast. It seems that before regulators spend another $1 trillion of the public’s money on radiation protection that may be based on faulty assumptions, someone ought to throw some research money Duesberg’s way. 07/10/05 - Weather Modification Last fall, a meteorologist named Ross Hoffman suggested in Scientific American that a network of microwave-beaming satellites could literally take the wind out of hurricanes. In some of the driest parts of Mexico, a Bedford-based company called Ionogenics is testing a rainmaking apparatus that uses an array of steel poles to ionize the air. China, a country with widespread cloud seeding, has announced plans to engineer clear weather in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics. 07/10/05 - Combining wind and hydrogen for power On the remote Norwegian island of Utsira stands a small hydrogen plant with two wind turbines gracefully rotating in the sky. "In 50 years' time, they will be everywhere. No one will use oil any more!" The factory is the first of its kind to produce electricity by combining wind power and hydrogen, a completely pollution-free method. On a good windy day, which Utsira has plenty of, where speeds average 10 metres [33ft] per second, the turbines can power the whole island. Any surplus is used to break water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. On days when the wind is weak, the stored hydrogen is used to produce electricity, either by burning it in a combustion engine or fusing it chemically with oxygen in a fuel cell, a kind of battery. The only by-product of the operation is water. 07/10/05 - Man vs Machine for space exploration So as President Bush pushes his blueprint to return humans to the moon no later than 2020 and eventually send them to Mars, even space enthusiasts are asking anew why the US should pursue manned spaceflight when machines can so far do more for far fewer dollars. "We are at a crossroads," says former NASA historian Roger Launius, now the curator of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington. "The decisions reached in the next two to three years will drive what happens in the next 30 to 40 years." 07/10/05 - Non-Lethal weapons update A weapon under development by Rheinmetall, based in Dorf, Germany, creates a conducting channel by using a small explosive charge to squirt a stream of tiny conductive fibres through the air at the victim. Xtreme Alternative Defense Systems (XADS), based in Anderson, Indiana, will be one of the first companies to market another type of wireless weapon. Instead of using fibres, the $9000 Close Quarters Shock Rifle projects an ionised gas, or plasma, towards the target, producing a conducting channel. It will also interfere with electronic ignition systems and stop vehicles. "We will be able to fire a stream of electricity like water out of a hose at one or many targets in a single sweep," claims XADS president Peter Bitar. XADS is also planning a more advanced weapon which it hopes will have a range of 100 metres or more. Instead of firing ionised gas, it will probably use a powerful laser to ionise the air itself. "Before, it took a laser about the size of two trucks," says Schlie. "Now we can do it with something that fits on a tabletop." The laser pulse must be very intense, but can be brief. So the makers of the weapons plan to use a UV laser to fire a 5-joule pulse lasting just 0.4 picoseconds - equating to a momentary power of more than 10 million megawatts. This intense pulse - which is said not to harm the eyes - ionises the air, producing long, thread-like filaments of glowing plasma that can be sustained by repeating the pulse every few milliseconds. This plasma channel is then used to deliver a shock to the victims similar to a Taser's 50,000-volt, 26-watt shock. 07/10/05 - Microwave non-lethal weapon (I had to post this because it gives the exact frquency that produces the heat/pain effect, with gun control, electronic non-lethal weapons might be just the way to go for the average citizen - JWD) Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, are working on a new way to fire a warning shot: with a blast of 95GHz millimetre-wave directed energy. It doesn't kill, but it hurts: a beam rapidly heats up the skin to produce a sensation of "intolerable pain". 07/10/05 - Dr. Paul Browns Resonant Nuclear battery Any moving charged particle yields a magnetic field, in which energy is stored, that is carried along with it. The absorption of this charged particle causes the magnetic field to collapse and this produces an emf. The energy yielded from this field collapse is enormous and is called the alpha or beta voltaic effect. The resonant nuclear battery is an LCR resonant tank circuit oscillating at its self-resonant frequency with energy contributed by the beta voltaic effect. The energy contributed to the tank, in excess of the circuit losses, must be removed through a high Q transformer impedance matched to the circuit. The result is a means for converting alpha and/or beta decay energy directly and efficiently into electricity, with a life expectancy determined by the half-life of the radioactive fuel used. Brown has invented a way to "organize" these magnetic fields so the great amounts of otherwise unobservable energy could be harnessed. The weight of the strontium-90 used to generate 75 watts of power in the Nucell prototype is approximately the same as the weight of 2 millimeters of wire cut off the end of a small paper clip. Projected sizes of the Nucell battery will range from the size of a soup can to the size of a small barrel or waste can for a 50 kilowatt model. 07/09/05 - Japan to begin leasing Fuel Cell vehicles to Americans Last week, American Honda Motor Co. signed a two-year leasing contract with the family of Jon Spallino in California to use its FCX fuel-cell car for $500 a month, making Honda the first automaker in the world to deliver its FCV to an individual customer. "By having individual customers drive in a real-world situation, the carmakers will be able to get feedback, which will be used to further improve the technology," said Hisashi Ishitani, a system and control engineering professor at Keio University. FCVs are powered by electricity generated through a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen, releasing water vapor as a byproduct. Once its hydrogen tank is filled, Toyota's new FCHV can travel up to 330 km, compared to the 300 km of the previous model, released in 2002, and it has 12.5 percent more output from the motor at 90 kw. Honda's FCX meanwhile has a range of 430 km and a 80-kw motor output. 07/09/05 - Enhancing taste? Or increasing efficacy? (This 'phenomenon' might have some practical uses, such as medicine intake - JWD) Straw power. H. Shiroyama asked the following question in the May 13, 2000, issue of New Scientist: I have heard it said that if you drink beer through a straw you will become intoxicated more quickly. Many of my friends have heard it too. Is it an urban myth or true and, if so, why? Thus challenged, the magazine editor conducted an informal test using ten easily found volunteers. Only half used straws; all had plenty of free beer. The five straw-users definitely performed worse on standard sobriety tests than the glass-lifters, even though both groups consumed the same amounts of beer. One New Scientist reader commented that one can get drunk still faster by consuming beer using a spoon instead of a straw. In Russia, chimed in another reader, the effect of vodka is greatly amplified if imbibed with a thimble instead of a glass. 07/09/05 - Anomalous pressure (Dark matter and push gravity correlations - JWD) Noting the high circular velocity of the stars and gas in the outer reaches of galaxies and that circular velocities should decrease with distance from the galactic center, just as planet velocities do in the solar system. They don't, so some gravitational force from some unseen mass must be producing a counterbalancing centrifugal force (mark that this is presumptious! The "force" need not be gravity.) Observations suggest that galaxies formed when the universe was less than a billion years old. The gravitational pull of the visible mass is inadequate to cause this clumping so quickly in the history of the universe. 07/09/05 - Quail egg Viagra mix (With the recent warnings about Viagra causing eye damage, this is of interest - JWD) The scientists of Bryansk University released a sensational statement. It was said the quail eggs contain phosphorus and ferrous substances which allows to refer them to powerful potency stimulants - not worse than the renowned Viagra. The poultry farm even exposed a miracle-working recipe to have the man-power back: 120 grams of cola, 20 grams of cognac, a spoonful of sugar and 2 raw quails’ eggs. You will feel like born again after drinking this cocktail, assured Snezhka. The customers are in excess now. 07/09/05 - Peculiar Anti-Clockwise tree falls in Russian forest (This intrigues me because of the 'universal spin' and reports of UFOs using a south pole CCW spin effect to achieve levitation, and Nick Nelsons research into vortex phenomena, though it could just be wind - JWD) It was noticed that all the trees had fallen down in one and the same anti-clockwise direction. The trees growing on the top of the hill, which is situated in the anomalous zone, were uprooted, whereas other trees growing closer to the foot of the hill were split or broken. Eyewitnesses of the phenomenon in the woods of the Khabarovsk region say that the incident reminded mysterious crop circles in the USA, although in Russia it occurred in the woods, not on a farm field. To crown it all, specialists found numerous dead birds there, presumably crows. 07/08/05 - Curious tampering of Comet NEAT Photos check out these peculiar photos that are the buzz in astronomical circles. I was intrigued by the 'enormous solar flare' that was jumping out in the direction of the comet which just 'disappeared' from the photos. Intriguing that the sun would target that comet with the solar flare! Would that make the comet electrical polarity negative? 07/08/05 - Pig manure converts to make oil for fuel If 50 percent of U.S. swine farms adopted this technology, we could see a [U.S.] 1.5-billion-dollar reduction in crude oil imports every year," Zhang said. "And swine producers could see a 10 percent increase in their income-about $10 to $15 per hog." (thanks Kenny!) 07/08/05 - Turkey oil from unused body parts Thermo-depolymerization mimics the Earth's own recipe for fossil fuels, but shaves millions of years off the production time. Waste-turkey guts, for instance-is mixed with water and ground into a thick slurry, which is then heated to 500 degrees Fahrenheit (260 degrees Celsius), pressurized at roughly 600 pounds per square inch (42 kilograms per square centimeter), and cooked for about 15 to 60 minutes until the organic material's molecular structure-its polymers-begin to break apart. Pressure on the mixture is then dropped, releasing steam that is recaptured to power the remaining process. More heat, then distillation, creates the byproducts-natural gas, which is diverted back to fuel the bio-reformer; crude oil, which can be sold to refineries; minerals, to be used in materials like fertilizers; and water. Barring nuclear waste, anything can yield these goods, according to proponents of the process: 100 pounds (45 kilograms) of tires, for instance, yields 44 pounds (20 kilograms) of oil (along with the other byproducts); a similar quantity of medical waste would result in 65 pounds (30 kilograms) of oil. 07/08/05 - Underwater Windmill provides 700,000 kwh/year for Arctic village The so-called tidal turbine is bolted to the floor of the Kvalsund Channel and was connected to the nearby town of Hammerfest's power grid on September 20. It is the first time in the world that electricity directly from a tidal current has been fed into a power grid. The gravitational tug of the moon produces a swift tidal current there that courses through the channel at about 8 feet (2.5 meters) per second and spins the 33-foot-(10-meter) long blades of the turbine. The blades automatically turn to face the ebb and flow of the tide and rotate at a pace of seven revolutions per minute, which is sufficient to produce 700,000 kilowatt hours of non-polluting energy per year-enough to power about 35 Norwegian homes (70 U.S. homes). "Basically it's like putting a windmill in the water," said Bjørn Bekken, a project manager for Hammerfest Strøm, the company that built the device. 07/07/05 - Windmills kill birds (here is a chance to invent something useful - JWD) A California Energy Commission study estimated wind turbines in the Altamont kill 881 to 1,300 birds of prey a year, including as many as 116 federally protected golden eagles. At the urging of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Alameda County officials have capped total generating capacity of wind turbines in the Altamont at 583 megawatts. One megawatt of generating capacity in a conventional power plant is enough to supply 750 to 1,000 homes, but wind farms on average only operate at about one-third of their rated capacity. Wind farm operators say bird deaths could decline when they "repower" their operations, scrapping thousands of wind turbines and replacing them with larger, more efficient turbines. 07/07/05 - 1935 - Organs grown outside the body A new method of transplanting living glands or any other parts out of the body into a glass chamber, there to live for days artificially fed on a blood substitute by an ingenious Lindbergh-designed mechanical "heart," has been announced by the scientific team of Carrel and Lindbergh. (Science, June 21). For the first time an entire organ has been made to live outside the body. The Lindbergh apparatus for maintaining a sterile pulsating circulation, combined with the Carrel techniques for transplanting organs and keeping them free from bacteria, has been used in 26 recent experiments. The organs made to live in vitro were: thyroid, ovary, suprarenal, spleen, heart, and kidney. The organs not only continued to live but some grew and added new cells and tissues to themselves. One organ more than tripled its weight in 5 days. 07/07/05 - First Hydrogen Plane Flight of 24 hours continuous (Note: a Japanese book and several studies say ozone damage is due primarily to jet exhaust from commercial flights - JWD) California-based AeroVironment says a full tank of hydrogen would keep the unmanned plane in the air for 24 hours. Planes using fuel cells might help curb greenhouse gas emissions from aviation. The aircraft, called Global Observer, looks more like a glider than a conventionally powered plane, with its wingspan of over 15m, small fuselage slung underneath and extended, "dragon-fly" tail. Along the front edge of the wing is a line of eight propellers. We had two flights of just over an hour each." 07/07/05 - Patents Gagged for National Security I think this is a prime example for not to patent, or you risk losing your invention! - JWD...AFTER years of hard work, you have finally perfected your greatest invention. You file for a patent, and then sit back to wait for the money to roll in. Except that it doesn't. Instead, you get a curt letter from a security official at the patent office, informing you that your patent will not see the light of day any time soon. The technology you have designed is a threat to national security and has been designated a state secret. Tell anyone, or try to patent the idea in another country, and you face two years in jail. Welcome to the murky world of black patents. Secrecy orders can be slapped on private inventions in 13 of the 26 member countries of NATO, as well as in Australia and New Zealand. (you have to pay for access to the full article) 07/07/05 - Cultured Meat “There would be a lot of benefits from cultured meat,” says Matheny, who studies agricultural economics and public health. “For one thing, you could control the nutrients. For example, most meats are high in the fatty acid Omega 6, which can cause high cholesterol and other health problems. With in vitro meat, you could replace that with Omega 3, which is a healthy fat. "Cultured meat could also reduce the pollution that results from raising livestock, and you wouldn’t need the drugs that are used on animals raised for meat.” “The benefits could be enormous,” Matheny says. “The demand for meat is increasing world wide -- China’s meat demand is doubling every ten years. Poultry consumption in India has doubled in the last five years. “With a single cell, you could theoretically produce the world’s annual meat supply. And you could do it in a way that’s better for the environment and human health. In the long term, this is a very feasible idea.” 07/06/05 - Healing qualities of Ozone The mixture of ozone and oxygen was used to treat wounded soldiers that suffered severe fractures, phlegmons, abscesses, etc. The experiments achieved quite impressive results in the 1920s and the 1930s, taking into consideration the fact that it was the time, when antibiotic had not been discovered yet. Doctors successfully used ozone for the treatment of surgical patients, including the ones with festering wounds. New techniques unveiled the broad efficiency of the ozone treatment: from bactericidal and anti-inflammatory effects to activation of metabolism, improvement of the oxygen-carrying capacity of blood and microcirculation of blood. It became known that ozone could be used for the treatment of diabetes and its consequences, as well as pathologies of digestive apparatus. In addition, ozone may become indispensable in the treatment of hepatitis B and C. 07/06/05 - 1.5KW Swift Micro-Turbines 4200kwh/year, 20 year life, rooftop mount. You could put several of these on your house and gang them together for more power. 07/06/05 - Thorium as 'safer' reactors Fueling nuclear reactors with the element thorium instead of uranium could produce half as much radioactive waste and reduce the availability of weapons-grade plutonium by as much as 80 percent. Thorium Power has been working with Russian researchers to find ways to dispose of stockpiles of weapons-grade plutonium by burning it in thorium reactors. In January, India -- which has the world's second largest reserve of thorium behind Australia -- announced it would begin testing the safety of a design of its own. 07/05/05 - Article on Atomic Oxygen and Irving Langmuir 07/05/05 - MAHG Atomic Oxygen Overunity with latest COP 21 The Moller's Atomic Hydrogen Generator (MAHG) is fully based on the Irving Langmuir discovery. In the MAHG, the hydrogen is merely dissociated and recombined and can therefore be recycled over and over again without consuming more hydrogen than the quantity used to start with. The Atomic Hydrogen Process is 100% CLEAN and SAFE. June 30th, 2005 - Latest Update : ONE HOUR tests with a COP of 21! 07/04/05 - Jagonline REMAT countdown completed A check of their webpage shows - ALTERNATIVE ENERGY UPDATE - ORLANDO, Fla., July 1 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- GMC Holding Corporation (OTC Pink Sheets: GMCC) - ( http.www.gmcholdings.com ) announced today results of internal testing and independent verification of its high-efficiency electromagnetic pulse motor-genarator. Mr. Eugene Augustin, PE, was asked to opine on the performance tests of GMC'S REMAT technology. Augustin indicated that the first test, measuring input/output power ratio, produced about 140% efficiency. In following tests, using a capacitor bank with a resistive load, the observed efficiency was 150%. According to Augustin, "These observations were demonstrating a 'greater than unity performance' device, which I thought that I would never see in mylifetime. In my 50 years of professional experience that includes patents on several inventions, teaching AC/DC machinery, including electric motors and generators, numerous designs in the field of microwave radiation and propagation and professional consulting in these fields, I believed that 'greater than unity devices' were an impossibility. I am now convinced that REMAT devices need to be explored, researched and tested so that this unique technology can be utilized for all the world." 07/03/05 - Patent blur between software and the hardware it controls Peter Dreiert from Siemens pointed out that the aim of CII (Computer Implemented Inventions) is to see software as an integral part of a device, rather than a separate thing embedded into it. This makes the software inseparable from the device, and hence patentable. Previously, software was seen as something embedded inside the hardware. Now we are seeing them as inseparable parts of the same system. In the future, it is not inconceivable that we will see hardware as being embedded within software, a bit like how today's computers often are just platforms to run and process our software and data, with the hardware secondary to the software side. The idea that an invention must "control a force of nature" to be patentable (suggested by the Parliament rapporteur Michel Rocard) is problematic even for the Scania trucks. An electronic traction control system literally controls forces, but what is innovative in a particular design is how it is controlled. This is where the software aspect becomes crucial and cannot be taken away. 07/03/05 - Goggle Free real time 3D TV Back in autumn 1986, while he was an optics-obsessed grad student, Mr. Travis had an idea that he called time multiplexing. Suppose you were to pass an image through a lens and open a shutter when it emerged to guide the image out at a precise angle. And suppose you could do that for 30 images a second through each of 10 angles. Like fanning out a deck of cards, you'd beam out 10 angles of your image so quickly that, no matter where the viewer was in relation to the screen, each of his eyes would see its own angle of live video. Voilà: natural 3-D. 07/03/05 - Why everyone needs Iodized Salt in their diet Insufficient iodine intake through food. Daily intake of adequately iodised salt a must for children, pregnant women and lactating mothers. Iodised salt should be stored in air-tight containers. Deficiency in iodine in daily food intake leads to a host of problems, such as development of goitre, mental retardation, stunted growth, deafness and dumbness, to name a few. These are collectively called the iodine deficiency disorders (IDD). 07/03/05 - Portable Lighting “Evaluated in terms of total cost of ownership, (purchase plus operation), WLED systems emerge as the most cost-effective solution for off-grid applications,” says Mills. He estimates that solar-powered WLEDs could appear on the market for $25 without need for subsidy. The annual fuel saving for each lantern is on the order of a month’s income for the poorest one billion people of the world, who often subsist on less than $1 a day. Fuel-based lighting is common, but incredibly inefficient: Although about one in four people obtain light exclusively from fuel, representing about 17% of global lighting energy costs, they receive only 0.1% of the resulting lighting energy services (lumen hours). [...] The total annual light output (about 12,000 lumen-hours) from a simple wick lamp is equivalent to that produced by a 100-watt incandescent bulb in a mere 10 hours. There is no question that the 2 billion people who are using fuel-based lighting will have their lives improved through the use of solar LED lighting. We have been working to get a useful and durable product for that market, and now have our Edulight (1W solar, 10 Wh battery and 1W LED bulb in a desk lamp format) at a price of CAD $40.95 (~USD $33). These are now in 13 countries and we are working with Rotary clubs to establish micro-banks so that the people who need them might be able to get them financed. Typically, less than a year should be required. We hope to help people use less fuel, endure less indoor air pollution, save money, experience fewer fires, and avoid eyestrain. 07/03/05 - Don't read if you are highly excitable - Happy Dependence Day! 07/03/05 - Implantable Stomach Pacemaker to lose weight Fascinating article reporting excellent results though tremendously expensive. In the latest attempt to tackle obesity, surgeons will insert the implant, which is similar to a pacemaker and costs about £12,000. The new procedure is safer than conventional obesity surgery, which involves stomach stapling or shortening the gut and risks wound infections and blood clots. The pacemaker, known formally as an implantable gastric stimulator, has produced impressive results during international trials on more than 700 volunteers. Data suggest that two years after the implant some patients shed 40% of their body weight. A person weighing 20 stones would thus drop to 12 stones. (1 stone = 14 pounds, meaning a 280 pound person would drop to 168 pounds) 07/03/05 - Some have asked what the animation in the upper right corner of the keelynet.com page stands for. It is a representation of how the aether/zpe influx reflects from Keely's Neutral Center to form a standing wave. In the terms used by Keely in the late 1800's, he referred to this standing wave boundary as 'This far shalt thou go, and no further.' The aether/zpe influx which cascades into the neutral center of all matter to create what is called gravity, time, weight and indeed, reality, is thus represented by this animation.