Tiny, portable box adds TOR to every Ethernet connection. And everything you do online.
Claim: cold fusion may have been verified by third-party researchers. I’ll believe it when I see it. Just posting as an item of interest for now. But oh my, if this ever turns out to be for real, it changes everything — and not just in tech or power generation.
(H/Ts: MJR and MtK)
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ADDED: Sigh. It’s possible both of these might turn out to be scams. Per Sam in Oregon, here’s the latest on the Anonabox.
Already got a reality check on the cold-fusion device below.
ADDED: A comment by a friend who works in the power-generation field:
I downloaded and read the paper on the cold fusion device, called E-Cat.
Disclosure: I would like for this to be true. It would improve the health and wellbeing of mankind at least as much as the mastery of fire.
Rossi has been making these claims for years. One of the common elements in all of his experiments is that he uses complex means to measure the energy.
This paper is no different. They have to estimate the energy losses for no fewer than 3 different physical effects. One of those, radiation, accounts for more than 100% of the observed “excess” heat.
That’s a red flag right there. A competent analysis would have predicted how the heat would manifest itself: so much to radiation, so much to convection, so much to conduction. Then they could have checked their results against this prediction.
But they didn’t do that. They didn’t even test their “control” at the same power and temperature levels. Another red flag.
Radiation is a very difficult way to measure energy production. The power goes as the temperature to the 4th power, so a 5% error in temperature gives a 22% error in power. Then the alumina they used has a big change in emissivity as a function of temperature, and the temperature of the tube is far from uniform.
Bottom line; the most likely explanation for the “excess heat” is a sum of small errors in the measurements.
There are also claims of isotopic shifts, but those are tough to measure with the equipment they used. The absence of any radiation means we would have to throw out most of what we know about nuclear physics.
I’m not at all against throwing out theories that don’t work. The problem is that nuclear physics works pretty darned well. Nuclear reactors, nuclear weapons, nuclear medicine, solar physics, cosmography, all of these things require detailed calculations of nuclear reactions and rates, and all of them get answers that are pretty much exactly right. There are always questions at the edges, such as solar neutrinos, but there isn’t any suggestion that the physics is wrong.
The process of throwing out older theories for better ones always follows the same path. The old theories work well enough for a while. Eventually we push the edges enough that the calculations start producing answers that don’t match what we see. A fair amount of data is collected showing that we have a problem. Then some smart person proposes a new theory that explains all of the old stuff AND all of the new stuff.
That isn’t happening here. There isn’t a collection of hints that we have a problem in nuclear physics. Quite the opposite. The further we push, the more confirmations we get.
So I don’t buy the claims of isotopic shifts.
Then there is the question of the complex experimental setup.
The excess power they claim is equivalent to nearly 2,000 watts of excess heat being produced. That’s a lot. If there really was that much heat, it would be easy to measure directly, without the trouble and errors of trying to calculate power from radiation.
Just one idea, to show how straightforward this could be.
Immerse the thing in wax, or lead, or salt. Make the container big enough that it is clearly impossible to melt the contents from the electrical input power alone. Then run it until the container is full of melted whatever. That’s proof. No fancy measurements required. A bit of engineering math in advance, build 2 or 3 to run controls before and after, and you have a bullet-proof demo.This isn’t a bullet-proof demo. It’s not even a demo. I don’t know if Rossi is running an elaborate con game or if he believes this stuff. It doesn’t matter; I’m pretty sure there is nothing here. I’d be more than happy to be proved wrong.
“there will now be a very extensive period of scrutiny from the scientific community at large.”
Why? That’s stupid. Just build a few units and let people use them to power their houses or whatever. “Buyer beware”. If they work, great. If they don’t- oh well, now we know.
I’ll read this latest report, and likely comment later at my blog, but Rossi has been making these claims about his E-cat for years. If his machine (previous iteration; this is supposedly a new variant) is as simple and cheap to build and generates the power (average 479 watts continuous) he claims, I see no reason he can’t go to market. Before, he wouldn’t allow actual complete third party testing (only third party observers of his own “tests”), wouldn’t provide tech data (he uses a “secret additive” that no one else is allowed to know) for anyone else to reproduce/falsify his data, and allowed only limited inspection of his device. Rossi refused a million dollar offer to demonstrate his device with power monitoring gear attached to the “ground” wire, as several observers have noted that the machine appears to be misconnected in a way that would be tough to do repeatedly by accident. The descriptions sound like the ground wire is connected to hot, which certainly would add a little extra kick to power measurements.
When I first heard of him, I thought it was cool, and hoped something would come of it. Later, I suspected he was a bit of a kook and simply mistaken. I’m now leaning toward the opinion apparently shared by a lot of frustrated people that he’s an outright fraud.
But I’ll read the report and see if something new is there.
Claire, that isotope analysis stuff in appendix 3 is beyond my layman’s knowledge. Can your friend tell us if the Table 1 isotope counts are implying that the “ash” is 1.2797 times as massive as the starting “fuel”? Maybe I missed it, but the only reference to total masses I found were the 542 gram E-cat post-test weight, the initial 1 gram of “fuel” powder, and test samples, both “fuel” and “ash” of which were 2.13mg for a different test.
I want to understand this properly, because if the “fuel” mass increased when it was reacted…
If it were a nuclear reaction, whether fusion, fission, or unicorn-enhanced rainbow droppings, I’d expect total mass to decrease ever so slightly as mass converted to energy. Not increase.
But a chemical reaction… I could see the “fuel” picking up additional mass from the alumina housing (or oxygen leakage).
Nothing I found in that report causes me to think E-cat style LENR is real, darn it. I do think the folks running the analyses mean well.
Bear — Thanks for looking into this. I just forwarded your question to my friend.
Bear, my friend responds:
Danke to your friend. I saw the dramatic shift in isotope ratios. He’s right; if that alone were real, Rossi would be rich enough to hire Gates, Buffet, Soros, and the Koch brothers as houseboys. Abused houseboys. What confused me, without actual mass measurements, was that the “counts” for each each isotope seemed to add up to an overall higher number in the “ash” than in the starting “fuel” mass-wise.
If I were taking this seriously, that shift towards heavier Ni isotopes would bug the heck out of me, too. Conventional theory holds that fusing anything past Iron (Fe) consumes energy rather than producing it. You might think that would suck up any alleged positive yield from the lithium reaction, for a net energy loss. Since our conventional theory seems to be fairly consistent with observed reality in fission reactors and fusors, I think it’s only fair for Rossi to explain that with something better than “magic happens”.
Seeing actual measurements of the start and finish fuel mass would be nice, along with a chemical analysis of the interior of the E-cat tube. The temperatures claimed are well beyond the melting point of lithium (and close enough to Ni melting point) to think some additional reactions with the alumina could be expected.
The more I see of Rossi’s E-cat, the more I think… BS.
A long time back I was a graduate student looking to build a career in nuclear fusion reactor research (tokamaks, etc). Then I bailed and got into something a little more mundane, electronic tech. I’m glad I did, because controlled nuclear fusion went nowhere…
I never spent much time looking at the cold fusion claims, they always seemed so pie-in-the-sky. Or they looked like perpetual motion machines. I’m a little mystified why these guys would be working so high in the periodic table (nickel); I thought fusion below iron was where the exothermic reactions were. Above that the reactions require a net input of energy. I might be wrong though, it’s been a while…
“Tiny, portable box adds TOR to every Ethernet connection. And everything you do online.”
Uh,oh.
http://bgr.com/2014/10/15/kickstarter-anonabox-tor-router-scam/?utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailyheadlines
Sigh. Thanks, Sam. Post updated accordingly.
I trust the adafruit folks:
http://www.adafruit.com/product/1406