Giant Japanese tower sucks up wind to generate electricity

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Japan has taken a recent interest in alternative forms of power generation, and one of their latest ideas is this 160 foot tall hexagonal tower that works twice as efficiently as conventional wind turbines, without giant spinning blades of death.

Now, I know what you're wondering. You're wondering why this tower contraption is necessary when we already have such good luck with regular old wind turbines, the ones that look like giant propellers. Well, besides being a menace to both birds and majestic vistas, my gut feeling is that since they look like giant propellers, they probably generate enough thrust to slowly but surely speed up the rotation of our planet until at some point in the future, days will last only minutes, minutes will last only seconds, and seconds will barely last long enough for you to wonder why the days are so short all of a sudden.

It's entirely possible that I'm dead wrong about all of that stuff, but why take the risk? And Japan, I assume, agrees with me, which is why this tower is designed to suck in wind from all directions at once, funneling it down a tunnel through the center of the structure and compressing it to spin turbines and generate electricity:

The tower can harvest wind energy over its entire surface area, and is about 2.5 times more efficient than a conventional turbine system while costing half as much to maintain. The design comes from Zena Systems, and they're planning to build it Fukuoka, Japan

Levitating train flies like a plane, no magnets involved

Prototype of the proposed levitating Aero Train.

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This week at the at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics in Shanghai, China, a bunch of Japanese researchers led by Yusuke Sugahara at Tohoku University showed off a prototype transport that hovers inches above the ground without maglev rails. To put it into geeky Star Wars speak: this is the Landspeeder you're looking for.

Categorized as a "ground-effect vehicle," the unmanned plane-train uses fast-moving air and several plane wings to levitate itself above the ground. The plan is to use this prototype vehicle to create an Aero Train (below) that's capable of traveling at 124 miles per hour in a "U-shaped concrete channel."

As shown in the demo video (without the safety channel), the "train" looks wobbly a few times, but is generally stable at its slow speeds. Crank that speed up and stuff this sucker into a channel and who know's what it'll feel like eating dinner on this thing.

The prototype train has been in the works for a year and was presented at the IRCA 2011 in China as part of a study. I think it's incredible that people are still experimenting with ways to kill the wheel. No matter how you look at it, hover vehicles still make up a majority of the concept ideas that litter sci-fi entertainment. With that said, the first one to create a hover train or car that isn't rinky-dink will have DVICE's everlasting respect.

Yusuke Sugahara, via Spectrum

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Scientists could be months away from discovering antigravity

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Scientists at CERN have announced that they've been able to trap 309 atoms of antihydrogen for over 15 minutes. This is long enough that soon, they'll be able to figure out whether antimatter obeys the law of gravity, or whether it's repelled by normal matter and falls "up" instead. It would be antigravity, for real.

While it's never been tested experimentally due to how difficult it is to create and store the stuff, it's disappointingly likely that antimatter will fall "down" just like regular matter. The thinking behind this is that antimatter (despite the "anti-") is made of regular ordinary energy, and even if it's got an opposite charge, it should still obey the same general rules as matter does. Antimatter falling up would mean a violation of the law of conservation of energy, among other things.

That said, if antimatter were to exhibit antigravity, it would go a long way towards explaining some of the peculiarities of our universe. For example, the universe is supposed to have just as much antimatter as it does matter, but we don't know where the antimatter is. If antimatter and normal matter repelled each other, it could mean that there are entire antimatter galaxies out there. Also, that repulsion would explain why the universe is not just expanding, but speeding up its expansion, something that's tricky to figure out when everything in the universe is always attracted towards everything else.

In either case, the team at CERN should be able to put the debate to rest within a couple months, when they plan to trap a blob of antihydrogen and then just watch it to see which way it falls. Down, and the laws of physics stay in place. Up, and you might just get that hoverboard you've always wanted.