One with the Speaker!

 

Nora Hipsher’s concept for an alternative portable audio system transforms your everyday bicycle into audio on wheels! The speaker works with vibration technology… unlike the regular structure of a speaker, there is no diaphragm. Instead, the voice coil of the speaker attaches to a movable plate that transfers the vibrations and energy to a surface on the bicycle and by that turns the bicycle into the speaker itself. The speaker connects to the bike frame and turns the frame into a big speaker. Therefore one can hear the music simply by plugging in to the bike!

Designer: Nofar Hipsher

Minimal Chapel in Austria

 

Posted: 14 Aug 2015 01:00 PM PDT

C’est dans une région entourée de vignobles et de collines, nommée Zollfeld et située en Autriche que le studio Sacher Locicero Architects a bâti la chapelle Maria Magdalena : une structure minimaliste en béton blanc, symbole de pureté. En fonction de la météo, les teintes de cet édifice religieux varient, passant du blanc immaculé au bleu dragée.

Computer science: Not just for boys or geeks

 

Mathematics and computer science teacher Jackie Corricelli is out to counter the myths about who should study what. She is a recipient of the 2013 Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching. Credit: NSF

China's solar industry hits downturn

 

Kieran Cooke 16th August 2015 China is by far the world's biggest producer of solar panels, writes Kieran Cooke. But the industry is suffering from over-capacity, razor thin profits and a failure to innovate. The recent turmoil in China's stock market has sent shockwaves through the country's corporate sector, including its mighty solar power industry which in recent years has grown to dominate the world market. Harnessing solar energy is considered a key way of cutting back on fossil fuel use and of meeting the challenge posed by climate change. Seven out of the world's top ten manufacturers of solar panels are China-based companies, together providing about 40% of global solar supplies. But now the industry's future expansion is under threat as companies try to cope with too much production capacity, very low profit margins and crushing amounts of debt. In 2013 Suntech, a Chinese company which was at one time the world's biggest manufacturer, went bust. International creditors are still trying to recoup millions lent to the company. Earlier this year the Hanergy Thin Film Power Group, a Chinese company which is a world leader in the manufacture of solar products, lost half its share valueamid concerns about its corporate structure and worries of over-capacity and falling profit margins in the solar market. Export boom slows Meanwhile the China-based conglomerate Yingli Green Energy Holding, another world leader in solar production, has been beset with rumours of a slowdown in demand leading to a halt in production at some of its plants. Like many other industries in China, the solar sector has grown fast: in recent years companies rushed to join in a solar export boom, bolstered by generous loans from government banks. Exports of solar products surged. But then US solar manufacturers complained of heavily subsidised China-made solar goods threatening to destroy their industry. Tariffs were imposed on a number of Chinese solar products. A slowdown in Europe's economy also hit export sales. China cut the price of its products: according to the Bloomberg New Energy Finance research group, China now sells solar panels for just over 60 US cents per watt of electricity generating capacity, down from US$4.50 per watt in 2008. While that's good news for those installing solar - and of considerable benefit in the fight against climate change - the price drop has put considerable pressure on China's solar manufacturers. It has also meant many solar companies elsewhere in the world have gone to the wall. China is subsidising the world's solar installations Varun Sivaram is a researcher at the US Council on Foreign Relations, specialising in renewable energy. He says that while China's dominance of the solar market has led to low global prices, the industry is not in a healthy state. "Solar is heading down a path of profitless prosperity", says Sivaram. In effect, he says, China is subsidising the global solar industry. Sivaram says one of the damaging side effects of China's dominance of the solar market is that production has tended to stick to old technologies and innovation in the industry has been stifled: "As panel manufacturers scrape by on razor-thin margins, kept afloat by government credit, investing in fundamentally new technologies is far from a priority." Some relief for the China industry might be provided by a government-backed campaign to boost sales in the domestic market. About a third of panels manufactured in China in 2014 were installed within the country. It's estimated that China will install 14 GWs (gigawatts) of solar panels this year, mainly involving giant solar farms in the Gobi desert and elsewhere. In central Europe an installed capacity of one GW of photovoltaics alone would be expected to produce almost 900 GWh of electricity annually, supplying around 225,000 households. In the first three months of 2015 China added the equivalent of the entire installed solar power of France to its electricity network.

Microscopic rake doubles efficiency of low-cost solar cells

 

A scanning electron microscope image shows the rigid pillar-like bristles of the FLUENCE rake, which is used to apply light-harvesting polymers to a solar cell. The distance between the pillars is 1 micrometer, about one-hundredth the diameter of a human hair. Credit: Z. Bao et al, Nature Communications Researchers from the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have developed a manufacturing technique that could double the electricity output of inexpensive solar cells by using a microscopic rake when applying light-harvesting polymers. When commercialized, this advance could help make polymer solar cells an economically attractive alternative to those made with much more expensive silicon-crystal wafers. In experiments, solar cells made with the tiny rake double the efficiency of cells made without it and are 18 percent better than cells made using a microscopic straightedge blade. The research was led by Zhenen Bao, a chemical engineering professor at Stanford and a member of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES), which is run jointly by SLAC and Stanford. The team reported its results August 12 in Nature Communications. "The fundamental scientific insights that come out of this work will give manufacturers a rational approach to improving their processes, rather than relying simply on trial and error," Bao said. "We also expect this simple, effective and versatile concept will be broadly applicable to making other polymer devices where properly aligning the molecules is important." The Problem With Polymers Although prices for silicon-based solar cells are dropping, it still takes five to 15 years before they produce enough electricity to offset their purchase and installation. Silicon solar cells also require a large amount of energy to manufacture, which partly offsets their value as renewable energy sources. Polymer-based photovoltaic cells are much cheaper because they're made of inexpensive materials that can be simply painted or printed in place. They are also flexible and require little energy to manufacture. While small, lab-scale samples can convert more than 10 percent of sunlight into electricity, the large-area coated cells have very low efficiency -- typically converting less than 5 percent, compared with 20-25 percent for commercial silicon-based cells. Polymer cells typically combine two types of polymers: A donor, which converts sunlight into electrons, and an acceptor, which stores the electrons until they can be removed from the cell as usable electricity. But when this mixture is deposited on a cell's conducting surface during manufacturing, the two types tend to separate as they dry into an irregular assortment of large clumps, making it more difficult for the cell to produce and harvest electrons. The SLAC/Stanford researchers' solution is a manufacturing technique called "fluid-enhanced crystal engineering," or FLUENCE, which was originally developed to improve the electrical conduction of organic semiconductors. In the current work, as the polymers are painted onto a conducting surface, they are forced through a slightly angled rake containing several rows of stiff microscopic pillars. The rake is scraped along the surface at the relatively slow speed of 25-100 micrometers per second, which translates to 3.5-14.2 inches per hour. The large polymer molecules untangle and mix with each other as they bounce off and flow past the pillars, ultimately drying into tiny nanometer-sized crystals of uniform size with enhanced electrical properties. Simulations and X-rays The researchers used computer simulations and X-ray analyses at two DOE Office of Science User Facilities -- SLAC's Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Advanced Light Source (ALS) -- to customize the FLUENCE rake for making solar cells. "At SSRL, the team used X-ray diffraction to measure the degree to which the polymers formed crystals and X-ray scattering to determine how clearly the two polymers segregated themselves," said Mike Toney, SSRL Materials Sciences group leader and a co-author on the paper. "These are bread-and-butter techniques for which we've developed some novel approaches at SSRL in recent years." To achieve the polymer patterns they wanted for the solar cells, the researchers made the pillars in the rake much shorter and more densely packed than those used earlier for organic semiconductors. They were 1.5 micrometers high and 1.2 micrometers apart; for comparison, a human hair is about 100 micrometers in diameter. Close, But Not Too Close "Ideally, the two types of photovoltaic polymers should be close enough to each other for electrons to move quickly from donor to acceptor, but not so close that the acceptor gives back its electrons before they can be harvested to electricity," said Yan Zhou, a Stanford researcher on Bao's team. "Our new FLUENCE rake achieves this happy medium. Because we understand what's happening, we can tune the rake design and processing speed to alter the final polymer structures." Future research will be aimed at applying the FLUENCE technique to other polymer blends and adapting it to rapid industrial-scale roll-to-roll printing processes -- which can reach speeds of 50 miles per hour -- that promise the lowest solar-cell manufacturing costs. Story Source: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. Journal Reference: Ying Diao, Yan Zhou, Tadanori Kurosawa, Leo Shaw, Cheng Wang, Steve Park, Yikun Guo, Julia A. Reinspach, Kevin Gu, Xiaodan Gu, Benjamin C. K. Tee, Changhyun Pang, Hongping Yan, Dahui Zhao, Michael F. Toney, Stefan C. B. Mannsfeld, Zhenan Bao. Flow-enhanced solution printing of all-polymer solar cells. Nature Communications, 2015; 6: 7955 DOI:10.1038/ncomms8955

Low-fat diet results in more fat loss than low-carb diet in humans

 

This is an artistic depiction of a study investigating whether low-fat or low-carb diets lead to more fat burning and fat loss. Credit: Kevin Hall A study from the US National Institutes of Health presents some of the most precise human data yet on whether cutting carbs or fat has the most benefits for losing body fat. In a paper published August 13 in Cell Metabolism, the researchers show how, contrary to popular claims, restricting dietary fat can lead to greater body fat loss than carb restriction, even though a low-carb diet reduces insulin and increases fat burning. Since 2003, Kevin Hall, PhD--a physicist turned metabolism researcher at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases--has been using data from dozens of controlled feeding studies conducted over decades of nutrition research to build mathematical models of how different nutrients affect human metabolism and body weight. He noticed that despite claims about carbohydrate versus fat restriction for weight loss, nobody had ever measured what would happen if carbs were selectively cut from the diet while fat remained at a baseline or vice versa. His model simulations showed that only the carb-restricted diet would lead to changes in the amount of fat burned by the body, whereas the reduced-fat diet would lead to greater overall body fat loss, but he needed the human data to back it up. "A lot of people have very strong opinions about what matters for weight loss, and the physiological data upon which those beliefs are based are sometimes lacking," Hall says. "I wanted to rigorously test the theory that carbohydrate restriction is particularly effective for losing body fat since this idea has been influencing many people's decisions about their diets." Studying the effects of diet on weight loss is often confounded by the difficulty in measuring what people actually eat--participants may not adhere to meal plans, misjudge amounts, or are not truthful in follow-up surveys. To counter this, Hall and colleagues confined 19 consenting adults with obesity to a metabolic ward for a pair of 2-week periods, over the course of which every morsel of food eaten was closely monitored and controlled. To keep the variables simple, the two observation periods were like two sides of a balance scale: during the first period, 30% of baseline calories were cut through carb restriction alone, while fat intake remained the same. During the second period the conditions were reversed. Each day, the researchers measured how much fat each participant ate and burned and used this information to calculate the rate of body fat loss. At the end of the two dieting periods, the mathematical model proved to be correct. Body fat lost with dietary fat restriction was greater compared with carbohydrate restriction, even though more fat was burned with the low-carb diet. However, over prolonged periods the model predicted that the body acts to minimize body fat differences between diets that are equal in calories but varying widely in their ratio of carbohydrate to fat. "There is one set of beliefs that says all calories are exactly equal when it comes to body fat loss and there's another that says carbohydrate calories are particularly fattening, so cutting those should lead to more fat loss," Hall says. "Our results showed that, actually, not all calories are created equal when it comes to body fat loss, but over the long term, it's pretty close." Hall does caution against making sweeping conclusions about how to diet from this study. The study's purpose was to explore the physiology of how equal calorie reductions of fat versus carbs affect the human body. The research is limited by its sample size; only 19 people could be enrolled due to the expense of such research and the restrictiveness of the carefully controlled protocol. However, this study clearly reaches statistical significance. In addition,, the menu that the participants followed does not emulate normal dieting and does not account for what diet would be easier to eat over extended periods. "We are trying to do very careful studies in humans to better understand the underlying physiology that will one day be able to help generate better recommendations about day-to-day dieting," Hall says. "But there is currently a gap between our understanding of the physiology and our ability to make effective diet recommendations for lasting weight loss." Hall recommends that for now, the best diet is the one that you can stick to. His lab will next investigate how reduced-carbohydrate and reduced-fat diets affect the brain's reward circuitry, as well as its response to food stimuli. He hopes these results might inform why people respond differently to different diets. Story Source: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Cell Press. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. Journal Reference: Kevin D. Hall, Thomas Bemis, Robert Brychta, Kong Y. Chen, Amber Courville, Emma J. Crayner, Stephanie Goodwin, Juen Guo, Lilian Howard, Nicolas D. Knuth, Bernard V. Miller, Carla M. Prado, Mario Siervo, Monica C. Skarulis, Mary Walter, Peter J. Walter, Laura Yannai. Calorie for Calorie, Dietary Fat Restriction Results in More Body Fat Loss than Carbohydrate Restriction in People with Obesity. Cell Metabolism, 2015; DOI: 10.1016/j.cmet.2015.07.021 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150813130016.htm

MIT’s groundbreaking mini fusion reactor could power the world within 10 years

 

by Cat DiStasio, 08/13/15 Engineers at MIT spend a lot of time figuring out how to make things better, faster, and often smaller. Now, powerful new magnet technology has led the way to a groundbreaking design for a small, modular fusion ARC reactor that generates the same amount of power as its larger predecessors. MIT researchers believe this new concept could be realized in as little as 10 years, and this type of power generation could be the clean, renewable energy the world has been waiting for. Nuclear fusion power plants are a dream fusion scientists have been chasing for decades, and it’s always been just out of reach. Until now, the enormous size and heat involved in a fusion reactor large enough to produce utility-scale power made projects like that very expensive. As with many things, the ability to make a fusion reactor smaller also makes it less expensive and easier to build. Related: MIT genius team can measure how fast a technology is developing Researchers have published their design proposal in the journal Fusion Engineering and Design. The new breakthrough design is based on a single advancement in magnet technology. The difference is commercially available superconductors, rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) superconducting tapes, which researchers propose to use in high-magnetic field coils for the reactor. According to Dennis Whyte, a professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering and director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, “It changes the whole thing.” In addition to being more economical to build, the superconductors in the smaller modular fusion reactor are strong enough to increase fusion power by about a factor of 10 compared to standard superconducting technology, says PhD candidate Brandon Sorbom, who co-authored the report with Whyte and 11 others at MIT. For perspective, Sorbom explains the world’s largest planned fusion power plant- a huge device called ITER that is under construction in France – was designed before these new superconductors were available and will cost $40 billion. If the same power capacity were to be achieved using MIT’s new design, Sorbom and the MIT team estimate the reactor would be about half the diameter or ITER and could produce about the same amount of power for a fraction of the cost, while being built in a shorter span of time. Via MIT Images via MIT ARC team and Jose‑Luis Olivares/MIT   http://inhabitat.com/groundbreaking-magnet-technology-from-mit-could-catalyze-renewable-nuclear-fusion-industry-within-10-years/

Under the bridges of Paris with you, I’ll make your dreams come true.

 

 

 

What Is EMCCD Technology

 

Definition of EMCCD Technology EMCCD technology is a digital scientific detector innovation first introduced to the imaging community by Andor Technology Plc. in early 2000, followed by a spectroscopy version in early 2005. At the time, Andor coined the term ‘Electron Multiplying Charge Coupled Device (EMCCD)’ to amply describe the underlying process that defines this novel new technology platform.* EMCCD is a quantitative digital camera technology that is capable of detecting single photon events whilst maintaining high Quantum Efficiency, achievable by way of a unique electron multiplying structure built into the sensor. Unlike a conventional CCD, an EMCCD is not limited by the readout noise of the output amplifier, even when operated at high readout speeds. This is achieved by adding a solid state Electron Multiplying (EM) register to the end of the normal serial register; this register allows weak signals to be multiplied before any readout noise is added by the output amplifier, hence rendering the read noise negligible. The EM register has several hundred stages that use higher than normal clock voltages. As charge is transferred through each stage the phenomenon of Impact Ionization is utilized to produce secondary electrons, and hence EM gain. When this is done over several hundred stages, the resultant gain can be (software) controlled from unity to hundreds or even thousands of times. * The term has since become the industry standard, used by almost every manufacture and user of this technology. Source of the article above : http://www.emccd.com/what_is_emccd/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- QuantEM:512SC EMCCD Camera Full Field-of-View Fluorescence Microscopy The QuantEM:512SC is the only scientific camera in the world that offers electron-multiplying (EM) gain with true quantitative stability across 16 bits at 10-MHz, 5-MHz, and 1.25-MHz operation speeds. A linearized and quantitative EM gain slider provides a much more intuitive, easily quantifiable EMCCD camera, while a self-calibrating EM gain feature ensures that the camera delivers the proper amounts of user-specified EM gain and remains quantitative over time. Key Camera Features Datasheets and Technical Resources Imaging Software and Drivers Published Articles and Research Contact Us EMCCD Cameras   |   CCD Cameras   |   Multichannel Imaging Systems   |   Retired Demo Cameras Primary Applications Quantitative FRET Multiprobe Experiments Ratiometric Ion Imaging Confocal Microscopy Live-Cell Fluorescence Imaging source: http://www.photometrics.com/products/emccdcams/quantem.php

A new look at superfluidity

 

Tue, 08/11/2015 - 8:11am Jennifer Chu, MIT News Office Equipment used by the Ketterle Group to create superfluids. Image: Bryce Vickmark Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) physicists have created a superfluid gas, the so-called Bose-Einstein condensate, for the first time in an extremely high magnetic field. The magnetic field is a synthetic magnetic field, generated using laser beams, and is 100 times stronger than that of the world’s strongest magnets. Within this magnetic field, the researchers could keep a gas superfluid for a tenth of a second—just long enough for the team to observe it. The researchers report their results in Nature Physics. A superfluid is a phase of matter that only certain liquids or gases can assume, if they are cooled to extremely low temperatures. At temperatures approaching absolute zero, atoms cease their individual, energetic trajectories, and start to move collectively as one wave. Superfluids are thought to flow endlessly, without losing energy, similar to electrons in a superconductor. Observing the behavior of superfluids therefore may help scientists improve the quality of superconducting magnets and sensors, and develop energy-efficient methods for transporting electricity. But superfluids are temperamental, and can disappear in a flash if atoms cannot be kept cold or confined. The MIT team combined several techniques in generating ultracold temperatures, to create and maintain a superfluid gas long enough to observe it at ultrahigh synthetic magnetic fields. “Going to extremes is the way to make discoveries,” says team leader Wolfgang Ketterle, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics at MIT. “We use ultracold atoms to map out and understand the behavior of materials which have not yet been created. In this sense, we are ahead of nature.” Ketterle’s team members include graduate students Colin Kennedy, William Cody Burton, and Woo Chang Chung. A superfluid with loops The team first used a combination of laser cooling and evaporative cooling methods, originally co-developed by Ketterle, to cool atoms of rubidium to nanokelvin temperatures. Atoms of rubidium are known as bosons, for their even number of nucleons and electrons. When cooled to near absolute zero, bosons form what’s called a Bose-Einstein condensate—a superfluid state that was first co-discovered by Ketterle, and for which he was ultimately awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in physics. After cooling the atoms, the researchers used a set of lasers to create a crystalline array of atoms, or optical lattice. The electric field of the laser beams creates what’s known as a periodic potential landscape, similar to an egg carton, which mimics the regular arrangement of particles in real crystalline materials.  When charged particles are exposed to magnetic fields, their trajectories are bent into circular orbits, causing them to loop around and around. The higher the magnetic field, the tighter a particle’s orbit becomes. However, to confine electrons to the microscopic scale of a crystalline material, a magnetic field 100 times stronger than that of the strongest magnets in the world would be required. The group asked whether this could be done with ultracold atoms in an optical lattice. Since the ultracold atoms are not charged, as electrons are, but are instead neutral particles, their trajectories are normally unaffected by magnetic fields.   Instead, the MIT group came up with a technique to generate a synthetic, ultrahigh magnetic field, using laser beams to push atoms around in tiny orbits, similar to the orbits of electrons under a real magnetic field. In 2013, Ketterle and his colleagues demonstrated the technique, along with other researchers in Germany, which uses a tilt of the optical lattice and two additional laser beams to control the motion of the atoms.  On a flat lattice, atoms can easily move around from site to site. However, in a tilted lattice, the atoms would have to work against gravity. In this scenario, atoms could only move with the help of laser beams.  “Now the laser beams could be used to make neutral atoms move around like electrons in a strong magnetic field,” added Kennedy. Using laser beams, the group could make the atoms orbit, or loop around, in a radius as small as two lattice squares, similar to how particles would move in an extremely high magnetic field. “Once we had the idea, we were really excited about it, because of its simplicity. All we had to do was take two suitable laser beams and carefully align them at specific angles, and then the atoms drastically change their behavior,” Kennedy says. “New perspectives to known physics” After developing the tilting technique to simulate a high magnetic field, the group worked for a year and a half to optimize the lasers and electronic controls to avoid any extraneous pushing of the atoms, which could make them lose their superfluid properties.    “It’s a complicated experiment, with a lot of laser beams, electronics, and magnets, and we really had to get everything stable,” Burton says. “It took so long just to iron out all the details to eventually have this ultracold matter in the presence of these high fields, and keep them cold—some of it was painstaking work.” In the end, the researchers were able to keep the superfluid gas stable for a tenth of a second. During that time, the team took time-of-flight pictures of the distribution of atoms to capture the topology, or shape, of the superfluid. Those images also reveal the structure of the magnetic field—something that’s been known, but never directly visualized until now. “The main accomplishment is that we were able to verify and identify the superfluid state,” Ketterle says. “If we can get synthetic magnetic fields under even better control, our laboratory could do years of research on this topic. For the expert, what it opens up is a new window into the quantum world, where materials with new properties can be studied.” Going forward, the team plans to carry out similar experiments, but to add strong interactions between ultracold atoms, or to incorporate different quantum states, or spins. Ketterle says such experiments would connect the research to important frontiers in material research, including quantum Hall physics and topological insulators. “We are adding new perspectives to physics,” Ketterle says. “We are touching on the unknown, but also showing physics that in principle is known, but at a new level of clarity.” Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

O Professor Pardal ataca novamente–2ª parte

 

A idéia que expus na primeira parte refere-se à um conceito básico da idéia de aproveitamento da força da gravidade. Muita coisa deverá ser modificada, mas o básico foi descrito.   O que deve ser modificado é o número de barras que irão descer dentro do conduto.  Muitas barras significarão um peso muito grande para que algum mecanismo movimente a roda até que a barra seguinte entre em ação. Eu pensei em apenas 2 barras no raio superior e 2 condutos vazios para receber a barra que está descendo. O peso também nunca poderia ser de 1 ou 2 toneladas. Propõem-se então, de início uma máquina leve com barras pesando 100 ou 200 Kg, ou então qualquer peso que seja necessário para movimentar o gerador.   O mecanismo mais adequado que se possa desenvolver deverá então impulsionar um peso qualquer que corresponde às 2 barras, e apenas durante um curto espaço de tempo e comprimento. A caixa de engrenagens poderá ser constituidas não de uma caixa metálica mas apenas de algumas engrenagens  que multiplicarão a velocidade adequada para que o o gerador produza eletricidade. Também não importa que a máquina desenvolva um movimento ininterrupto. Se durante alguns minutos o alternador estiver girando, este estará carregando uma bateria. por exemplo, não importa que haja interrupções. Não se deve esquecer que toda idéia nova é de início combatida, criticada, ridicularizada,  mas que no final acaba funcionando.  Uma idéia que permaneceu séculos sendo perseguida, deixando muitos mentalmente insanos, foi a do moto contínuo, uma máquina capaz de produzir um trabalho mecânico a partir de sistemas que mantivessem a máquina girando a partir de uma ação inicial, sem usar para isso qualquer fonte de energia Provou-se que tal máquina seria impossível de produzir trabalho, criar energia. Hoje em dia sonhadores que ainda tentam, conseguem que uma maquineta gire sem parar, mas não tem força suficiente para realizar qualquer trabalho ou produzir qualquer quantidade de energia   Com relação ao meu projeto, uma gerador mesmo com imãs potentes de neodímio, um alternador automotivo por exemplo não deverá exigir um grande esforço mecãnico para que gire. A diferença entre a famosa máquina do moto contínuo e a minha é que aquela não dispunha de nenhuma fonte de energia e a minha dispõe de uma que até agora não ouvi falar que poderia ser aproveitada, que é a força da gravidade, nesse caso representada por barras de metal livremente descendo por um conduto e fazendo girar engrenagens multiplicadoras de velocidade que faça um gerador produzir eletricidade. O sistema elétrico, ou seja o retificador,  ou qualquer outro acessório é um detalhe separado. Obstáculos irão existir, mas todas as idéias desse tipo relacionadas com produção de energia continuam até hoje sendo desenvolvidas, e com certeza muitos obstáculos tiveram que ser resolvidos.  Ainda não se chegou à um ponto perfeito, mas todas elas funcionam. Autor: José Sidenei de Melo, idealizador da máquina movida à força da gravidade.