New Paradigm Digest » technology

VW’s Floating Concept Car

Jeff — Wed, 09 May 2012 18:33:45 +0000

Those receiving this by e-mail can watch this video by clicking on the yellow link or visiting newparadigmdigest.com. Enjoy!

Inexpensive Solar Cells For the World

Jeff — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 15:28:36 +0000

MIT researcher Andreas Mershin has a vision that within a few years, people in remote villages in the developing world may be able to make their own solar panels, at low cost, using otherwise worthless agricultural waste as their raw material. Watch his You Tube video and learn about this disruptive new technology.

Flying Car is One Step Closer to Your Driveway

Jeff — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 18:24:28 +0000

Massachusetts-based firm Terrafugia said their production prototype “Transition” car-plane had completed an eight-minute test flight, clearing the way for it to hit the market within a year. ”With this flight, the team demonstrated an ability to accomplish what had been called an impossible dream,” said founder Carl Dietrich.

The two-seater craft, which has the rounded features of a Fiat 500 and collapsible wings, is on presale for $279,000 and some 100 vehicles have already been ordered.

While many companies have successfully built a flying car, none have succeeded in producing more than a handful of models. But things have changed since the clunky Curtiss Autoplane hopped and spluttered into action in the early 1900s. New materials and computer-aided design mean today’s flying cars are cheaper and lighter to build. They also look more like “Blade Runner” than “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”

The successful test flight has given hope to aficionados that this staple of science fiction is a step closer to reality. ”Is it going to be like the Jetsons with everyone driving one in five years? No,” admitted Winfield Keller, vice president of The International Flying Car Association, a trade group. ”But we are getting to the point where 10, maybe 15 years from now that the people owning and operating (them) will be everyday people.”

In the meantime manufacturers hope they can build something that appeals to border security agencies, the police or the military, as well as hobbyists. Terrafugia is targeting pilots looking for a bit more flexibility and fewer hangar fees. Spanning 90 inches (2.3m) the same as a car, it fits into a normal-sized garage, before unfurling a 26 foot (8m) wingspan. The Transition, they say offers unparalleled freedom of movement, with a range of 490 miles (787 kilometers) and without the need to check bags.

But to take advantage, would-be owners will need to have both a driver’s and pilot’s license — with a minimum of 20 hours of flying time. The craft needs 2,500 feet (762 meters) of runway for takeoff, meaning pulling onto the shoulder and escaping the traffic is not really an option. ”The Transition Street-Legal Airplane is now a significant step closer to being a commercial reality,” the company said.

At least two other companies are racing to bring an autoplane to the market. Dutch company PAL-V has tested a prototype gyrocopter-style car. It hopes to now build a full production prototype and to have the first deliveries by 2014. California-based Moller International has built a personal vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, although it requires a little more training to operate.

New Paradigm Energy

Jeff — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 23:14:43 +0000

One day we may have this technology running our homes for a few hundred dollars. May it be so.

Kickstarter: Fund an Air Quality Egg

Jeff — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 21:07:08 +0000

My Favorite Free Energy Expert Tells It Like It Is

Jeff — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 20:25:01 +0000

My friend, Wade Frazier is arguably one of the most knowledgable people on the planet when it comes to free energy having lived a cycle of getting a highly efficient heat pump to market and it’s consequences as well as researching the subject in depth. Wade continues to inform to a small audience that wants to get to the truth in a sea of misinformation and deception and do what they can to get this technology where it belongs-in the hand of the many. The following piece is part of a large collection that Wade has shared at Project Avalon.net and his site, A Healed Planet.net. Be forewarned, once you visit Wade’s site, you may go down a rabbit hole and spend hours exploring. But that’s a good thing.

It is time once again to reiterate my intention for my public FE work. I have done it several times, and each time I say it a little differently, so that the point can get across, because it is obviously a difficult concept, even when people are trying to understand. It took me many hard years to arrive at my perspective, and I sympathize with people who have been influenced by all the scientists, inventors, and promoters who have dominated this subject for many years. I am not taking their approach.

The analogy this time will focus on the automobile. What are cars good for? What are their transformative effects on societies? What are their costs and benefits? The conversation can stray into the metallurgy for making lighter, stronger engines, or valve design, radiator design, gear ratios, or the various ways that fuel can be introduced and combusted. Those are important scientific and engineering issues, but they generally have tangential impact on the discussion of what a car is good for and how it can transform a society. Technical types can discuss why cars get the MPGs they do and how that can be improved. But anybody who discusses the technicalities of high MPG carburetors, without an understanding that the corporate imperative is to keep MPGs low to help the oil companies, is missing the dynamic’s most important part. High MPG carburetors do not mean anything in a corporate culture that has effectively banished them:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#carb1

The world’s best engine does not mean anything:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy.htm#glimpse

in a world where such disruptive technologies are shelved and buried by the score, even if they ever get to the point of becoming a market threat (which rarely happens).

Dennis discovered the hard way that Washington’s electric companies were not really interested in energy conservation,

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#run

even when their propaganda said so:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#whoops

To continue reading this informative piece, click here.

Paradise or Oblivion: A New Documentary from Jacque Fresco’s Venus Project

Jeff — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 15:14:17 +0000

Paradise or Oblivion details the root causes of the systemic value disorders and detrimental symptoms caused by our current established system. This video presentation advocates a new socio-economic system, which is updated to present-day knowledge, featuring the life-long work of Social Engineer, Futurist, Inventor and Industrial Designer Jacque Fresco, which he calls a Resource-Based Economy.

The film details the need to outgrow the dated and inefficient methods of politics, law, business, or any other “establishment” notions of human affairs, and use the methods of science, combined with high technology, to provide for the needs of all the world’s people. It is not based on the opinions of the political and financial elite or on illusionary so-called democracies, but on maintaining a dynamic equilibrium with the planet that could ultimately provide abundance for all people.

Paradise or Oblivion, by The Venus Project, introduces the viewer to a more appropriate value system that would be required to enable this caring and holistic approach to benefit human civilization. This alternative surpasses the need for a monetary-based, controlled, and scarcity-oriented environment, which we find ourselves in today.

*This is NOT the “major motion picture” that The Venus Project is working towards but rather is a 52 min. documentary to introduce the aims and proposals to new people. Paradise or Oblivion will be released in March 2012 and we will post a link to the documentary as soon as it is released.

In the meantime, if you are not familiar with the work of Jacque Fresco and his Venus Project, here is a link to his highly informative newsletter and The Venue Project site. Fresco is one of the most brilliant minds of our time and his visionary proposals make total sense. He just raised funds to hire a screenwriter to develop a feature film that can inform the world that a solution exists to humanity’s challenges. This film cannot arrive too soon. Like Buckminster Fuller before him, the world is fortunate to have his brilliant mind and heart in service to life. NPD will continue to update readers on Jacque’s progress as it means our progress.

The Next Chapter in Cold Fusion

Jeff — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 15:13:14 +0000

Once again, cold fusion is in the news. We hope this innovation is true and gets to see the light of day for the benefit of humanity where others have not. Stay tuned.

Italian inventor, Andrea Rossi has conducted what some are saying is a successful small test of the Holy Grail of energy production – cold fusion, a low-energy nuclear reaction that could theoretically produce endless, self-sustaining and incredibly cheap energy. Rossi tested his energy catalyzer that he calls the E-Cat for an unnamed U.S. company and claims it produced about as much energy as 70 gallons of gasoline over a period of 5 hours. There’s plenty of mystery and skepticism surrounding Rossi’s cold fusion test, but he says the “E-Cat is going into mass production soon.”

To read more and watch a video of E-Cat in action, click here.

Flying With Jetman

Jeff — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 01:53:08 +0000

Recalibrating Priorities: Just Because We Can Doesn’t Mean We Should

Jeff — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 20:24:07 +0000

By Peter Oldfield, NPD Associate Editor

Recent public debate has rightly and at last asked questions about the formerly sacrosanct realms that drive our scientific and technological pursuits in the realm of astrophysics.

Witness the desire to laser-illumine a point near the center of the Milky Way. This extravagant program, one that happens to be under the aegis of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), supports other international astrophysical consortiums with the same questionable academic prerogatives they’ve all been trotting out for sixty years or more, and now well into the post-modern era.

They appear to be holding an entranced world to ransom, as it were; and it is happening right now in the pristine Atacama Desert of coastal Chile, right in the lap of a deprived local populace.

It is clearly a question of priorities as, contrary to popular sentiment, the ‘wow technologies’ have caused us to lose sight of a more human reality. These costly ventures need to be entirely relegated to their proper place, i.e. of lesser importance than the well-being of every last child in the human family.

You can GoogleEarth the coordinates: 24º 37′ 38″ S, 70º 24′ 15″ W and see this extravagance in broad daylight – and notice the curious structure in the top left hand corner of this picture!

A foot-note:

Why do I use the word ‘enchantment’?

Because it carries that slightly benign implication found in ‘fairyland’, and that, after all, is where we’ve been taken. It prepares us then to contemplate, with kindness toward ourselves, the question “What was our part in this?” And as good an answer as any might be “We fell asleep”.

Now at last we are awakening together to the possibility that our civilizational hubris, a kind of ‘shadow’, in the early Jungian sense, that chose to sacrifice human well-being and our deeper connectedness to the matrix of nature, over the altar of a techno-scientific vision, has not simply faltered but has rather, in Titanic fashion, now hit the ice-berg of complete self-deception.

A desire for transcendence no doubt arises in the hearts and minds of all human collectivities, but we must now ask whether we have confused suitable means for attaining that higher goal.

Confidence in the vision has been building up over centuries of Eurocentric power and expansion. Indeed one can trace it back to that peculiarly western story of Gilgamesh and his doomed empire. It has it’s fullest expression in the current imperial prerogatives assumed by our own leadership.

One cannot help noticing that the most visible and fully constellated image in the American mythos is “The Wizard of Oz”.

Clearly the curtain is about to be drawn on the deceptive techno-wizardry that so completely swept Dorothy and her friends along as they faithfully followed the yellow brick path!