Rob is with the Vancouver Gadgeteers group; techies should check out their online videos that relate to energy. He figures that if technically capable people learn how to install their own solar equipment, they could become self-sufficient for less than $2,000, because solar panels bought wholesale from China cost only about one cent per watt…If so, I’d like that!

Rob, also known as “ebike Bob,” is a nominee at the City of Richmond’s Arts Awards and will be showing the solar ebike project at Richmond, BC, Canada city hall at 8 pm on May 8. He intends to demonstrate doubled or even tripled range “without resorting to finicky Lithium batteries.”

Check out the Gadgeteers about the solar ebike trailer here. Here’s a link to a video that explains how they add diodes, and a link to video about building the charging plug to the battery pack.

gadgeteers@operamail.com

Inventions I hadn’t heard about before are found in comments posted on March 11 and April 20, 2012, under recent blogposts. Also you might not know that this site goes back to 2007 and I’ve posted some of my earlier magazine articles. I’ll be uploading more of my past articles about new energy topics — articles that were published in Explore New Dimensions, Atlantis Rising and other magazines.

inside his econo-car — will interest the researcher/tinkerer. His  Eagle-Research sells the technologies he talks about.

Wiseman is working on an updated version of his Water As Fuel book. The Eagle-Research website explains why he embraced a  Patent Free philosophy; it ” bypasses greed and suppression, allowing a huge increase in the growth of the technology.”

He cites an example:  “Yull Brown spent nearly 30 years and over $25 million dollars trying to commercialize Brown’s Gas using the ‘patent’ route. He spent a significant amount of the money (and his time) on patents and fighting patent infringements; he died penniless.   The technology is now developing so fast because we are using the opposite philosophy that Yull Brown used. Why keep using a philosophy that obviously didn’t work? If you want a different result, change something.   Eagle-Research redeveloped the Brown’s Gas technology from scratch in eight months time, with a total research budget of $6,000 per month. Yull Brown was so secretive that he was no help to us. Our machines were half the weight and size; took half the wattage to make the same volume of gas; operate quietly and have safety features not found on any previous designs. We were able to do this by openly cooperating with anyone who is interested in the technology. We finance the research by selling the information (as books) and by selling the world’s best Brown’s Gas watertorches. Abundance mentality states, ‘help others and you help yourself’.

I visited the inventor in Penticton BC, on my way home from the Conference on Future Energy, part of the Space Propulsion and Energy Sciences International Forum which I’ll report on in Infinite Energy magazine.  

George Wiseman invents fuel-saving and other energy-related innovations and he doesn’t hold back secrets’ of, nor patent, his work. It’s distributed worldwide as public knowledge, so no one else can legally patent it either because patent law says “public domain information” is not patentable.

Well, some people have tried and recently did succeed in patenting something George had already open-sourced. It slipped through the bureaucracy. “The patent office is very inefficient that way,” he says. “However in the end their patent will get thrown out.”

So how does Wiseman make a living and finance his ongoing research? His company (http://eagle-research.com) makes money immediately by selling books about his energy solutions, and selling other products such as do-it-yourself kits.

Instead of investing time and thousands of dollars getting a patent, he plows any profits back into further product development. He finds that gives a much better chance of getting the product into the marketplace and money into his pocket. Not to say that patents don’t apply in some situations, he says, but they just aren’t good for inventors in his situation. Instead he gets quick, inexpensive and sufficient protection with nondisclosure agreements, trademarks and copyrights.

Loyal buyers of his books and kits contribute suggestions for improving the next version of whatever product they bought. The knowledge becomes a shared innovation pool and speeds up research-and-development. It’s the grassroots answer to corporations’ high-priced research teams or “skunkworks.”

Some other inventors seeing what he’s accomplished are switching to Wiseman’s methods.

Their strategies have something in common with the emerging open-source civilization described in a recent article I read. Michel Baumens, a founder of the Peer-to-Peer Foundation, sees a new economic paradigm. Baumens points to the Occupy movement as an example of new business and value practices.

Although it’s a political movement, its participants when occupying a park had to forge ways to meet their physical needs — food, shelter and healthcare — as well as expressing their values. Their protest camp near Wall Street reached consensus through a general assembly and developed working groups and other practices that communities in extraordinary circumstances could modify to suit local needs. Baumens points out that that the citizens decided on the most appropriate system for getting their provisions, not the property owners “and money owners in an economy divorced from ethical values.”

Despite the chaos in this playpen called Earth, maybe the kids will work it out.

“You state in Hunting the Higgs, that ‘In 1964… Higgs came up with an explanation: the universe is pervaded by an invisible cosmic molasses.’ Higgs has gotten a lot of press for this, so much so that modern-day physicists have literally spent hundreds of millions of dollars looking for the Higgs boson, the ‘particle’ that gives matter its mass.”

“The Emperor’s New Clothes… all Higgs really did is re-name the ‘ether’ which, although accepted by every major physicist in the 18th century (e.g., Maxwell, Fitzgerald, Kelvin, Lorentz), now became relegated to persona non-grata when Einstein stated that light could travel as particles rather than waves in their journey, say, from the sun to the earth.”

“This has wrongly been concluded that Einstein did away with the so-called ether, but what he really did was say it was undetectable, which is a very different thing.”

“In 1934, Einstein’s adversary in this view, Nikola Tesla, revealed to Teddy Roosevelt’s grand nephew, 24-year-old Joseph Alsop, (fated to become a major journalist), one of his greatest secrets, namely that he believed that the sun was absorbing more energy than it was radiating (NY Herald, July 11, 1934).”

“Out of the hundreds of interviews Tesla gave and his numerous articles, Tesla never published his ‘dynamic theory of gravity’ which is what this was.”

“Having spent over 35 years studying Tesla’s work, I have been able to essentially piece together this hidden theory which explains what the God particle is (see my book Transcending the Speed of Light). The ether of course, exists. Just look at a picture of a galaxy and you will see that it is floating in something. You can call it the Higgs field if you want, but it is indeed the medium existing throughout all of space.”

“This ether most likely exists in a tachyonic (faster than the speed of light) realm. It oscillates at such a high frequency, that it remains undetectable by modern day methods. ”

“What gravity is, according to this theory is simply the absorption of ether by elementary particles. During this process which involves particle spin, this on-going course of action is converted into electromagnetism. This simple idea explains Einstein’s 40-year quest, his dream of Grand Unification, namely the way to combine gravity (the influx of ether into matter) with electromagnetism.”

“There is no Higgs boson. It is not a particle but rather a process. Note the simple elegance to the theory.”

Marc J. Seifer, Ph.D.
author: Wizard: The Life & Times of Nikola Tesla

I’ll be giving an overview talk, with Powerpoint slides, as more of a historian and non-techie who has interviewed dozens of scientists and engineers in the “free energy” scene for the past thirty years. I want to give a sampling of the rich variety of breakthrough energy inventions and their fascinating history.  Then I can settle back and listen to the here-and-now advice from the technical speakers at the conference who provide the how-to details.

To recap that year: producers of the TV program 60 Minutes had wanted to find out whether cold fusion is real. They looked for an independent scientist to check it out and chose Rob Duncan, vice chancellor of research at Missouri University and an expert in measuring energy. He was said to have been a skeptic about cold fusion before 60 Minutes sent him to Israel to investigate the work of a company called Energetics Technologies. Duncan was given free rein in Energetics’ cold fusion laboratory and came back convinced that the process is real.

After Duncan returned from that trip, the billionaire phoned to chat with him.

It took a while for Kimmel’s interest to translate into funding for the university, but recently Duncan learned about the generous gift of money and equipment. Kimmel’s donation will create a Sidney Kimmel Institute for Nuclear Renaissance which will involve researchers from the Missouri University Research Reactor, and physics, engineering and chemistry departments.

The gift will allow M.U. scientists to do pure-science research. One online commentator said it could keep a scientific team going for a year.

The Columbia Daily Tribune, the newspaper that’s my main source for this story, cites Kimmel’s statement that he chose Missouri University because it is has research capacity across several fields and is interested in benefiting society.

Cold fusion research is more advanced than most people realize. Over the years since 1989, certain scientists around the world have seen excess heat from experiments with forms of hydrogen interacting with palladium, platinum or nickel. Many of them now call it Low Energy Nuclear Reactions, or LENR. If researchers learn exactly where the heat comes from, they and others may be able to repeat the success consistently.

Then we’d eventually be able  to replace that gas-fueled furnace with an LENR clean-energy heater.

It’s not aimed at techies.

Instead, in public-friendly language,  a senior research scientist at NASA’s Langley research center says “NASA’s method” of LENR which uses materials such as nickel, carbon and hydrogen has shown that it can “produce excess amounts of energy, cleanly, without hazardous ionizing radiation, and without producing nasty waste.”

Notice that the scientist, Joseph Zawodny, says LENR “has the demonstrated ability to produce excess amounts of energy.” He doesn’t say whose experiments demonstrated it. He could mean that NASA scientists have witnessed repeatable experiments and have maybe paid for further research into LENR.  Or maybe they do have a working prototype themselves, who knows?

The video also doesn’t mention the Italian entrepreneur Andrea Rossi whose announcements about his own hydrogen/powdered nickel/catalyst invention are making news around the world.  But hey, it’s only a two-minute clip. To get the public’s attention you have to be short-and-to-the-point.

Critics object to the vagueness of the video and accuse the scientist of jockeying for future research grants by giving NASA credit for theoretical work others have done. But is that the most important question?

Our world is in danger of exploding into the ugliest of oil wars. Maybe Dr. Zawodny and his boss at the research center care enough to feel the urgency of humankind’s situation.  I believe that is the case.  At a two-day Foundation for the Future workshop a few years ago which included the very perceptive chief scientist at NASA Langley, Dennis Bushnell, I heard Bushnell’s concerns about energy and where we’re headed. Also more recently he’s spoken at the Conference on Future Energy. Dr. Bushnell is on pages 39-40 of  Breakthrough Power, 2011 edition.

Whatever the motivation for releasing the NASA video,  it’s out and its easy-to-understand message could touch the public as well as reach whatever funding entities it’s aimed at.

“While the world is drastically dependent on fossil fuels, researchers at NASA Langley research center are working on another way of producing energy-efficient nuclear power,” the video begins.

After briefly illustrating a theory about LENR  the video answers what would be my main question– could LENR end the dependence on dirty energy technologies? “This clean form of energy is also powerful, able to support everything from transportation systems to infrastructure.”

Dr. Zawodny says the easiest place to use the LENR process  would be in the home. “You would have a unit that would replace your water heater. And you would have some sort of cycle to drive electrical energy from that. And then it would dump its waste heat into the water, or air handling system for the building.”

“So it would be a dual use thing, it would be sitting there producing heat then you’d drive electricity from it to run your electronics. Power the house, power the building, power the light industry.”

“And then the waste heat would be used for environmental control. And warm water.”

Despite its unwieldy title “Method for Enhancement of Surface Plasmon Polaritons to Initiate and Sustain LENR,” the video is clearly meant for a non-technical audience.

Suggestion:  Send this to your nearest politician or environmental activist. Then send it to everyone on your list. The political will to changeover  to clean technology doesn’t develop magically, in an oil-soaked world. People must tell other people what our choices really are.

Thomas Valone is asking energy news groups to help Nikola Tesla’s last close living relative to keep the non-profit Tesla Memorial Society alive. Valone, a PhD engineer and president of Integrity Research Institute, Washington DC,  http://www.teslamemorialsociety.org/ says Tesla’s relative William Terbo is interested in Valone’s proposed “three-prong attack on the kingpins who made big money off of Tesla, as explained on page 23 of (Valone’s) book, Harnessing the Wheelwork of Nature: Tesla’s Science of Energy.”

“We have a window of opportunity to accompany Bill as we visit Westinghouse, GE, and the J.P. Morgan foundation which gave away $10 million in 2010 to nonprofit organizations.” To show what each of these companies owe Tesla today, Valone listed dollar amounts in his book as he wrote in detail about the ways in which the companies had taken advantage of Tesla and his inventions.

Tesla was an electrical genius who brought us the system of AC power that we use today, and he deserved much better treatment from the “tycoons” than he received. Valone says Tesla spent the last 40 years of his life in financial poverty but he was too much of a gentleman to hold a grudge.

In his autobiography, Tesla wrote that he was unwilling to give small-minded and jealous individuals the satisfaction of having thwarted his efforts. “My (Wardenclyffe) project was retarded by laws of nature. The world was not prepared for it. It was too far ahead of time. But the same laws will prevail in the end and make it a triumphal success.”

Valone believes it’s an easy sell to embarrass Westinghouse, General Electric and the J.P. Morgan Foundation into setting the record straight for historical and ethical reasons. Today he put out a call on Facebook: “Let me know if anyone is interested in pursuing this heroic mission.”