Leading edge science in the home shop?

I strongly suspect that there are some elegant and affordable experiments similar to the Cavendish experiment which could help prove Mike McCulloch's Quantized Inertia theory. 

If you were to use a servo to keep weights on a torsion balance stationary, you could measure the current required and have a very sensitive gravity balance.  The suspended weights and servo could all be soldered inside a copper pipe to all but eliminate drafts and electrostatic forces as noise sources.

A computer controlled linear stage could be used to log data, and to move the test masses external to the assembly and make many measurements over weeks or months of the forces with weights and different distances.

I hope to do this experiment in the next year or two.  I welcome anyone who cares to do it before or after me.

What they put in the water

So, some workers in Bellaire, Ohio accidentally put less toxic than normal chemical in the water supply, but they had to purge it. They put in 40 pounds of Hydrochloric acid (found in your stomach) instead of an unknown normal quantity of Flouride.

What harm could a lower pH really do?  Clean out some pipes, or are they worried about dissolved lead? All of the calcium buildup would buffer it out quickly anyway.

People just don't understand Chemistry these days, do they?

Tiny bubbles - and why you should care a bit

I recieved a link to an MIT tech TV news release about storing energy... and it didn't really explain it well... so I dugg around and found out more. Here's how I explained it to my friends in an email:

The reasons you should care about this are laid out better in this video, which explains a lot more of the details:

 

http://techtv.mit.edu/videos/273-tiny-bubbles

 

 

At 3:26 they nicely explain about the reduced voltage required (which means it's more efficient) of 1.6 Volts instead of 2.3 volts of the 1.2 volts you could potentially recover in a fuel cell.

 

At 3:55 they explain that there are no precious metals involved, which means it could be scaled quickly once they tweak it.

 

At 5:15 they explain why they started experimenting with cobalt compounds to avoid precious metals

 

At 5:45 they explain the nifty catalyst they set out to make and investigate

 

At 6:05 - it didn't work... serendipity occurs instead

 

At 6:55 - they don't know how it works... but they are willing to learn

 

 

 

So... here we have a new way of efficiently converting excess electrical power to hydrogen and oxygen. This is a critical part of the cycle required to store energy for later use. 

 

I consider this the modern physics equivalent of inventing the first granary. It's a new place to securely store a harvest from the sun.