"Using a mouse is so 2012!" :>

'' Asus Laptops and Desktops to Ship with Leap Motion's Gesture Control
...
The deal will see Leap Motion’s sensors and software packaged with some “high-end” laptops and PCs. The bundled products will appear in the first quarter of 2013, says Leap, around the same time the standalone Leap Motion device, priced at $70, is due to begin shipping.
...
Leap also announced a new round of investment funding, taking the total raised by the company from $15 million to $45 million. “The main reason was to support a very dramatic ramping up in our manufacturing,” says Buckwald. '' [source and also here]

More news about cold fusion (it's snowing after all :D )

''Rossi--a lone Italian inventor with no real credentials and a history as a convicted scam artist--has convinced a small army of researchers that his box can harness a new type of nuclear reaction. What if they're right?

... To my astonishment, after three days of asking every cold-fusion researcher in the house, I couldn’t find a single person willing to call Rossi a con man. The consensus was that he had something, even if he didn’t understand why it worked or how to control it. The more I learned, the more confused I became. Could Rossi actually have something real?

...Rossi’s past demonstrations were tightly controlled affairs. A month after the botched investor demo, when he debuted his 1-megawatt (mW) E-Cat for the public, he made people stand outside in the cold, inviting them in one at a time for a five-minute glimpse. So I was surprised when he left me alone to poke around his warehouse for hours.

... That very morning, he said, the Swiss industrial certification firm SGS had completed safety tests of the 1mW plant. He didn’t have the actual paper certificate from SGS to show me (he expected to receive it by mail in August), but he did have new customers—sort of. Two more plants would be going out the door in September.

... I managed to reschedule a visit with the ringleader of the skeptics gang, Ugo Bardi. Bardi is a professor of physical chemistry at the University of Florence. ... Bardi and his colleagues believed there was something to the story. 
“For a while, I must admit I had some revolution in my mind that told me maybe this guy invented something special,” Bardi said. He smiled ruefully. “It’s a scam. It doesn’t work.”

... “So they’re all wasting their time?” I said.
“Yes,” Polosa said, “exactly.”
“They are not serious insofar as doing a sort of religion work rather than doing science,” Ruocco said at one point. “They believe in something and they want to demonstrate that.” '' [source]

What the wind can do for you

A new kind of wind-harvesting technology "Windstalks"
''  Windstalk is completely silent, and the image associated with them is something we're already used to seeing in a field of wheat or reeds in a marsh. '' [video]


'' Unbelievable Kinetic Sculptures of Theo Jansen. ... 
Theo Jansen calls his kinetic sculptures “Animari.” The creatures walk in herds on beaches, powered only by the wind. Some of them are able to capture and store the wind, then keep moving for extended times.'' [source] 

Brian Josephson on Meeting With Andrea Rossi

'' [...] Brian Josephson, retired professor of physics at Cambridge University, and 1973 Nobel prize winner for physics. Dr. Josephson recently met with Andrea Rossi in Miami. [...]
I find it difficult to imagine a conversation with a scammer having proceeded in the way that it did during our meeting, and feel that factors such as those listed above are much the more likely explanation for his behaviour. There is no reason why an inventor should adhere to the standards demanded of scientists and academics.'' [source]

Cold fusion... what is happening?

At MIT: ''During the meeting the NANOR table top cold fusion unit was apparently present and running.
[...]
Cold Fusion Times reported that NANOR has been able to continuously produce heat for two months. If that is true it would indicate that Jet Energy has a potentially reliable LENR technology. Swartz and Hagelstein demonstrated the device as part of a week long cold fusion course that they taught at MIT in January. Jet Energy calls its technology Lattice Assisted Nuclear Reaction or LANR. I still haven’t been able to find out what NANOR stands for.
No plans for commercializing NANOR are posted at Jet Energy’s website. The site mentions two technologies LANR and the PHUSOR electrode. PHUSOR is apparently designed for wound treatment. Swartz operates Jet Energy.'' [source]

And also at this site:
''From January 23 to 31, MIT Electrical Engineering Prof. Peter Hagelstein conducted a course on cold fusion at MIT. “Cold Fusion 101: Introduction to Excess Power in Fleischmann-Pons Experiments” was part of MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP), during which students can take credit or non-credit courses in a variety of subjects (some, like cold fusion, not offered as part of MIT’s regular course selection).

Five MIT students attended the course, four of whom had been students of Hagelstein’s. Another 15 or so individuals from outside MIT were also in attendance. During the first week, Hagelstein provided a theoretical and experimental overview of the cold fusion field, with lectures focusing on (but not limited to): excess power in Fleischmann and Pons’ early experiments; claim of energy production without chemical or nuclear products; theoretical difficulties and overview; hydrogen/deuterium evolution reactions and electrochemical models; excess power as a function of loading; vacancies and codeposition; the nuclear ash problem; correlation of He-4 with excess power; excess power in the NiH system.

For the final two days of the course on January 30 and 31, Dr. Mitchell Swartz spoke to the class about experimental lattice-assisted nuclear reaction/cold fusion (LANR/CF) systems, including those engineering modifications discovered by JET Energy, Inc. and other groups for controlling and increasing the excess heat obtained from activated CF/LANR devices.  ''

This instead is HOT FUSION, but in a sort of desktop version:
''Koel applies science of surface chemistry to fusion research at PPPL. 
In the lab down the hall from Bruce Koel's new office, the temperature is about to go up over 11 million degrees Centigrade in a hot tub-sized chamber that cradles the energy of a burning star.
...

The fusing together of atoms releases vast amounts of energy, but the process can take place only at extremely high temperatures. For fusion to be the basis of the power plant of the future, scientists need to find ways to keep the process from cooling.   

Amazingly, a thin metal lining, just the width of a human hair, on the inner wall of the reactor could help prevent this cooling. Koel is collaborating with PPPL scientists to study materials for this lining. The most promising lining is lithium, the lightest metal on Earth and the only metal that floats on water.
...

If the experiments are successful, the plasma fusion reactor of the future could sport a thin liquid lithium wall. But because lithium is so light, the molten metal would stick to the surface rather than running down the walls. One concept for a future reactor involves constantly replenishing the liquid lithium wall using nozzles to emit a broad, uniform sheet of liquid, similar to a decorative "wall of water" fountain. 

Using lithium, physicists at PPPL hope to increase the efficiency of fusion reactors, unleashing greater amounts of energy from smaller-sized plasmas. With current designs, plasma chambers must be massive if the fusion reaction is to release more energy than it consumes for heating and confining the plasma. A prototype fusion chamber known as ITER, which is being built in France to demonstrate that fusion is a viable energy source for the future, will stand three stories high. '' [source]

Fu-sion! Fu-sion! :)

''Low-Budget Fusion Reactor ... 
General Fusion's reactor design consists of 220 pistons that simultaneously ram a metal sphere. This creates a shock wave inside the sphere, so that plasma rings in the center create a fusion reaction.  '' [source]

'' Need a weekend project around the house? Mark Suppes, web developer by day, has built his own nuclear fusion reactor in a Brooklyn workspace. ... While all the components of Suppes' machine – including the deuterium gas – were acquired through legal channels, some of it is somewhat dangerous. His power supply provides 30,000 volts, and his reactor does put off a negligible amount of radiation as it smashes neutrons together.
Suppes' reactor does not generate any more power than he puts into it, and as such is not the golden fusion generator scientists hope will fuel the future with clean, cheap energy.'' [source]

''It’s amazing no one thought of it before: nuclear fusion from a levitating tire-sized magnet surrounded by 10-million-degree plasma. ...
a joint project between MIT and Columbia University  ... The MIT project offers a unique alternative to the two existing approaches to nuclear fusion that dominate the field. Tokamaks attempt to manipulate atoms by surrounding a central plasma-filled chamber with magnets. In an inertial fusion reactor, high-powered lasers bombard a fuel pellet in the center of the device to set a fusion reaction in motion.  ... '' [source]

BTW...
''On the ITER side of the fence, you'll have the largest and strongest magnets in the world: some 14 meters high; some as heavy as a fully-loaded Boeing 747; some 24 metres in diameter. A stone's throw away, on the CEA-Cadarache side, their microscopic counterpart: no more than 50 nanometres in size (50 billionth of a metre!). Magnets by the hundreds of millions packed into one single drop of water. ...  Magnet-producing bacteria are nothing new.  ... Genetically-modified MTB could be used for environmental clean-up or as intelligent contrasting agents in medical imaging techniques such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) ...'' [source]

Cold fusion - perhaps yes, perhaps no :(

''Fraud claims over E-Cat 'cold fusion' machine heating up...'' [source]

And even NASA now talks about "cold fusion"
''Cold Fusion: NASA Says Nothing Useful'' [source]

Piezoelectric Display

''Piezoelectric display works because of the ability of some materials to create some sort of an electric field when mechanical stress is applied to it. ... '' It could also be used backwards, to create materials that change their tactile properties [source and here].

Can Cold Fusion be real?

'' If low-temperature fusion does exist and can be perfected, power generation could be decentralized. Each home could heat itself and produce its own electricity, probably using a form of water as fuel. Even automobiles might be cold fusion powered.
...
Moreover, according to some experimental data, low-temperature fusion doesn't create significant hazardous radiation or radioactive waste.
...
[...] some highly qualified researchers disagree.
George Miley, who received the Edward Teller medal for innovative research in hot fusion and has edited Fusion Technology magazine for the American Nuclear Society for more than 15 years: "There's very strong evidence that low-energy nuclear reactions do occur. Numerous experiments have shown definitive results - as do my own."
...
In fact, despite the scandal, laboratories in at least eight countries are still spending millions on cold fusion research. During the past nine years this work has yielded a huge body of evidence, while remaining virtually unknown - because most academic journals adamantly refuse to publish papers on it.
'' [source]

''A well respected researcher is claiming that he has replicated some of the results that Andrea Rossi is getting from his e-cat cold fusion device. This could be an important development because it could verify Rossi’s claims and silence some of his many skeptics.
...
Dr. George H. Miley a nuclear engineering professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Tsingua University in Beijing. '' [source]

e-cat

''1 MW E-Cat Cold Fusion Device Test Successful
On October 28, 2011, Andrea Rossi demonstrated his 1 megawatt E-Cat system to his first customer, who had engineers/scientists on hand to test/validate its performance. Due to a glitch, it provided 479 kW of continuous power for 5.5 hours during the self-sustained mode.'' [source]

There were some issues, so it couldn't be run at full power in self-looped mode, but what it did do was plenty impressive.

It ran for 5.5 hours producing 479 kW, while in self-looped mode. That means no substantial external energy was required to make it run, because it kept itself running, even while producing an excess of nearly half a megawatt. Rossi explained the reasons for this in the presentation he gave, which I videotaped and will be posting later.

I hope I will be able to buy one soon ;)

Cold fusion: 1 megawatt unit on sale

''Andrea Rossi has announced that he has begun sales of what he calls 1 megawatt e-cat cold fusion units. The first was sold to the mysterious American buyer for whom he conducted the October 28, test in Bologna.'' [source]

''Andrea Rossi started the test of his 1 megawatt e-cat cold fusion device in Bologna today. The purpose of the test is to see if the low energy nuclear reaction device can generate a sustained reaction that can continuously make large amounts of heat. If it can it could theoretically be able to generate enough heat to run a steam engine to power a vehicle or an electric generator.''

See also here for more news and details.

e-cat to be tested October 6 - THE TIME IS NOW!

''“With reference to the subject-matter of the application in re, we wish to inform you that an experiment run by the inventor, Mr. Andrea Rossi on a module of a 1MW plant will take place on October 6th, 2011 in Bologna (IT) in a laboratory made available by the University of Bologna.
“This experiment will be attended by professors from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, as well as professors in Physics from the USA, China, Japan, France, Great Britain, Greece, Russia and Italy. An official report will be published and made available on the Internet at a later date.”
[...]
it looks like with such an invitation sent out this Bologna event is set in stone; there’s no going back now!'' [source]

I'm very excited and curious about this coming test. If it works, we are in a new era of energy abundance, otherwise perhaps the whole e-cat project is doomed.
Crossing fingers for a brighter future! :D

Discussion: Andrea Rossi's 'E-cat' nuclear reactor

In January 2011 Andrea Rossi demonstrated a device that purported to develop 10 kW of power from a nuclear reaction. This video discusses its credibility, the investigations that have been done on the device, and its future prospects. The participants in this discussion, Brian Josephson and Judith Driscoll, are professors of physics, and materials science, respectively at Cambridge University.

Video found via: Infinite Engergy Magazine (http://www.infinite-energy.com/images/pdfs/FleischmannWatches.pdf)

For more info: here.

Shape Memory Alloy actuators

''MuscleWires'' [source]

''Green ALTernative Heat Engine'' [source]



''Muscle Wire Experiment2'' [source]

Cold fusion patented!

''The Italian Patent Office, Ufficio Italiano Brevetti e Marchi, granted a patent for the energy catalyzer on April 6, 2011, valid until April 9, 2028.'' [source]

E-cat device: explained here.

''Andrea Rossi with support of scientific consultant and physicist Sergio Focardi has created a device called the “Energy Catalyzer” or “E-Cat.” The device generates a cold fusion reaction with nickel powder and hydrogen as fuel sources to generate heat energy. An initial public demonstration in January 2011 revealed that with only 1 kW of energy input into the device, it yielded 12 kW of heat energy output.
...
Sources reveal that MIT has requested plans for Rossi’s reactor to try and duplicate the experiment. However, Rossi’s reply was that they could buy it once he puts it to market. This is probably because MIT is the same University that made it a point over 20 years ago to disprove cold fusion following Pons and Fleischmann’s revolutionary discovery of the reaction, stalling its development for nearly a quarter century.''

More info here.

What happened to the AIR car?

''In 2008, India’s largest car manufacturer announced that it would begin production of world’s first commercial vehicle to run on nothing but a puff of air — compressed air, that is.

The Air Car concept, developed by the French company Motor Development International (MDI) in partnership with Indian giant Tata Motors, would have used compressed air, as opposed to the gas-and-oxygen explosions of internal-combustion models, to push its engine’s pistons.

The car was said to achieve speeds of up to 68 mph with a range of 125 miles between fill-ups, all for less than $13,000.
...
Although the Tata version of the zero-emissions car might never make it into commercial production, a more credible version is currently being developed by a duo of mechanical engineering professors in India.'' [source, more here]

A working air engine!
''Angelo Di Pietro is an Italian engine designer who once worked for Mercedes Benz on their Wankel Rotary engine in 1969-1970, then migrated to Australia to pursue other interests, among them, as hobbyist / inventor of the Di Pietro Rotary Air Engine.
...
This very efficient, effective, non-reciprocating configuration allows the air engine to be very small and compact, yet very powerful. Any car guy worth his salt should recognize that this combination of high power and small size / weight translates into a great application for personal transportation. To that end, Di Pietro has adapted his air motor to carriers for produce markets, ATV load carriers, scooters and even boats (shown).'' [source]

A New Rotary Engine Design

A start-up, Liquid Piston, aims to greatly improve the efficiency of internal combustion (2011).
[video]

More about rotary engine [here] (2006).

Nuclear fusion by the end of the year (2010) :>

New transistors: An alternative to silicon and better than graphene

''Smaller and more energy-efficient electronic chips could be made using molybdenite.
...
A discovery made at EPFL could play an important role in electronics, allowing us to make transistors that are smaller and more energy efficient. Research carried out in the Laboratory of Nanoscale Electronics and Structures (LANES) has revealed that molybdenite, or MoS2, is a very effective semiconductor. This mineral, which is abundant in nature, is often used as an element in steel alloys or as an additive in lubricants. But it had not yet been extensively studied for use in electronics.
...
(It uses) 100,000 times less energy (than silicon)'' [source, and here]

Cold fusion (or bullshit?)

''Hopes about cold fusion have been raised once again by two Italian researcher who claim to have fused atomic nuclei at room temperature.'' [source]
''Italian Scientists Claim (Dubious) Cold Fusion Breakthrough
...it’s a thrill to learn that two Italian scientists claim to have successfully developed a cold fusion reactor that produces 12,400 watts of heat power per 400 watts of input. Not only that, but they’ll be commercially available in just three months.
...
The problem is, they [Andrea Rossi and Sergio Focardi] haven’t provided any details on how the process works. After their paper was rejected by several peer reviewed scientific journals, it was published in the Journal of Nuclear Physics-- an online journal apparently founded by Rossi and Focardi. Further, they say they can’t account for how the cold fusion is triggered, fostering deep skepticism from others in the scientific community.
'' [source]

However, it is true that there is serious research in "trasmutation" [see here], and the researchers working in this field often lament the total lack of interest from the mainstream media.
So, as required by healthy skepticism, here you have the Infinite Energy Magazine article about the discovery: article.

To keep an open mind, while remaining a skeptic, I like to remind myself that Science does not work according to majority rule.
Often in history of Science the most absurd ideas turned out to be right (e.g. Galileo's problems with authorities, early problems about the germ theory, vaccination was considered a bit like bio-technologies today, and of course Darwin ridiculed and depicted as a monkey).

PS I was almost forgetting anesthesia, that was opposed initially, and still it seems just the most human thing to do nowadays.