via http://www.alistreview.com/2006/08/steorn_gets_the_blogosphere_bu.html:
Steorn, an Irish technology company, has claimed to have developed “a technology that produces free, clean and constant energy.“ They issued a challenge for scientists to test the technology and more than 1300 have taken the bait.
From the website:
Steorn is making three claims for its technology:
- The technology has a coefficient of performance greater than 100%.
- The operation of the technology (i.e. the creation of energy) is not derived from the degradation of its component parts.
- There is no identifiable environmental source of the energy (as might be witnessed by a cooling of ambient air temperature).
The sum of these claims is that our technology creates free energy.
If it is true, what a leap forward. I have the feeling this is just a big hoax…
The Article:
Scientists flock to test ‘free energy’ discovery
David Smith
Sunday August 20, 2006
The Observer
A man who claims to have developed a free energy technology which could power everything from mobile phones to cars has received more than 400 applications from scientists to test it.
Sean McCarthy says that no one was more sceptical than he when Steorn, his small hi-tech firm in Dublin, hit upon a way of generating clean, free and constant energy from the interaction of magnetic fields. ‘It wasn’t so much a Eureka moment as a get-back-in-there-and-check-your-instruments moment, although in far more colourful language,’ said McCarthy. But when he attempted to share his findings, he says, scientists either put the phone down on him or refused to endorse him publicly in case they damaged their academic reputations. So last week he took out a full-page advert in the Economist magazine, challenging the scientific community to examine his technology.
McCarthy claims it provides five times the amount of energy a mobile phone battery generates for the same size, and does not have to be recharged. Within 36 hours of his advert appearing he had been contacted by 420 scientists in Europe, America and Australia, and a further 4,606 people had registered to receive the results.
And now, the video…
Steorn launch revolutionary free, clean, energy technology –
bastp62Steorn have developed a technology that produces free, clean and constant energy.
This means never having to recharge your phone, never having to refuel your car. A world with an infinite supply of clean energy for all.
01:20 – August 17, 2006
From the ScienceNews Blog,
The AP reports that the Pacific Coasts’ “dead zone” has returned. The dead zone was first discovered in 2002.
The oxygen-starved “dead zone” along the Pacific Coast that is causing massive crab and fish die-offs is worse than initially thought, scientists said.
Weather, not pollution, appears to be the culprit, scientists said, and no relief is in sight. However, some said there is no immediate sign of long-term damage to the crab fishery in the dead zone, a 70-mile stretch of water along the Continental Shelf between Florence and Lincoln City.
Oregon State University scientists looking for weather changes that could reverse the situation aren’t finding them. They say levels of dissolved oxygen critical to marine life are the lowest since the first dead zone was identified in 2002. It has returned every year.
Strong upwelling winds pushed a low-oxygen pool of deep water toward shore, suffocating marine life, said Jane Lubchenco, a professor of marine biology at OSU.
The article says Oregon State University scientists saw a crab graveyard and thousands of dead sea creatures in the dead zone. Scientists are blaming low-oxygen water triggered by global warming for the dead zone. So far, the local commercial fishing industry has not been impacted.
Barry Fox over at the NewScientist Blogs writes,
The way to make firearms really safe, says Hebert Meyerle of Germany, is to password-protect the ammunition itself.
Meyerle is patenting a design for a modified cartridge that would be fired by a burst of high-frequency radio energy. But the energy would only ignite the charge if a solid-state switch within the cartridge had been activated. This would only happen if a password entered into the gun using a tiny keypad matched one stored in the cartridge.
When they are sold, cartridges could be programmed with a password that matches the purchaser’s gun. An owner could set the gun to request the password when it is reloaded, or to perform a biometric check before firing. The gun could also automatically lock itself after a pre-set period of time has passed since the password was entered.
The system would undoubtedly cost more than a conventional gun, but many firearm enthusiasts would surely pay a premium for such added security.
Plenty of good comments posted,
This is a terrible idea. It will hinder those who may need the weapon for self defense long enough to become dead, and will do absolutely NOTHING to stop an accidental death or misuse by a thieving criminal.
Want safer guns? Kill the criminals.
From the Daily Show, Fall of 2005. Seems relevant.
The New York Times printed an article regarding Public Acceptance of Evolution quoting a study published in the current issue of Science magazine.
In surveys conducted in 2005, people in the United States and 32 European countries were asked whether to respond “true,” “false” or “not sure” to this statement: “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.” The same question was posed to Japanese adults in 2001.
The United States had the second-highest percentage of adults who said the statement was false and the second-lowest percentage who said the statement was true, researchers reported in the current issue of Science.
Only adults in Turkey expressed more doubts on evolution. In Iceland, 85 percent agreed with the statement.
Interesting.