Word: powers
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Human activity is modifying precipitation in other dramatic ways. Satellite images show that industrial aerosols--sulfuric acid and the like--emitted by steel mills, oil refineries and power plants are suppressing rainfall downwind of major industrial centers. In Australia, Canada and Turkey, according to one study, these pollution patterns perfectly coincide with corridors within which precipitation is virtually nil. Reason: the aerosols interfere with the mechanism by which the water vapor in clouds condenses and grows into raindrops big enough to reach the ground...
...jump more than 3 ft. in less than 30 sec., shaking the ground for perhaps 100 miles and triggering an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.7. Bridges will buckle. Apartment buildings will pancake. The dorms at the University of California, Berkeley, will roll like barrels on a wave. Water, power and transportation lines will be cut. The subway that runs under the bay could be a death trap. By the time the dust settles, more than 100,000 people will be homeless. Economic losses will total at least $35 billion. The human cost will be immeasurable...
That, in essence, is all a perpetual-motion machine amounts to: a device that operates without any external power source. Or, rather, doesn't operate--for perpetual-motion devices are mechanical impossibilities--and unless someone finds a way to repeal two fundamental laws of physics, they always will be. The regulations in question are the first and second laws of thermodynamics. They say, respectively, that energy can be neither created nor destroyed but only changed in form and that it's impossible to make a machine that doesn't waste at least a little energy. In short...
...1800s, so at least the early advocates of perpetual motion had the excuse of ignorance. In 1618, for example, a London doctor named Robert Fludd invented a waterwheel that needed no river to drive it. Water poured into his system would, in theory, turn a wheel that would power a pump that would cause the water to flow back over the wheel that would power the pump, and so on. But the second law means that any friction created by wheel and pump would turn into heat and noise; reconverting that into mechanical energy would take an external power source...
...admit their machines are using outside energy--usually via new theories of physics that physicists don't grasp yet. Joseph Newman, for example, a Mississippi inventor, promoted an "Energy Machine" in the 1980s that operated via "gyroscopic particles." More recently, New Jersey inventor Randell Mills has been pushing power from "hydrinos." Still others claim they're tapping the "zero-point energy" that fills all space. The first two are considered nonsensical, and while zero-point energy has a basis in science, using it to run a machine does...