Four years later…

With this technology, each home would be able to produce all the electricity it needs not only to run the household, but also to power a car.

So where is it and why isn’t this news?

And what’s happened since?

In 2010, he signed with something called the Tata Group of India to commercialize his research. Then in 2012 Harvard hired him away from MIT.

Here he is entertaining undergraduates at Harvard in September 2012. I liked it better when he was talking about the science and how it would be applied.

Related article…

Helmet Nazis and the Culture of Fear

by Karen De Coster
LewRockwell.com

I despise the Safety Nazis and the culture of fear they have created. Wear a helmet. Don’t go out when it’s too hot. Don’t leave your home when it’s too cold, and if you do, heed the 1,001 warnings. Be afraid at all times. Run for cover. Lock your children in enormous safety devices called car seats. Buy a stroller built like an armored Volvo, complete with side air bags and ironclad sun protection. Stay inside if the wind blows or a snowflake falls. Is there a dark cloud or two in the sky? Close the schools. Call your doctor if you sneeze, and call your lawyer if you trip. Don’t ever do anything that has the potential to cause injury. Red alerts, orange alerts, and now text alerts – they are all imbecile alerts that are geared toward emotionally crippling the masses.

The save-you-from-yourself nannies are an intrusive and irritating bunch. “Safety” has become a sick obsession in the modern American culture, and this fear mongering has long been promoted by an overreaching, paternal state that has churned out a nation of helpless idiots through the revolving doors of government schools and a politicized nanny state that holds people captive to their own bogus fears.

One of the most fashionable forms of lifestyle fascism in the American Folly Safety Parade is the sustained push for mandatory helmet laws and the crush of propaganda asserting that certified, bulletproof, and government-approved helmets are necessary for every activity from the baby crawling to biking along your neighborhood sidewalk.

As an avid cyclist, the folks I ride with are a mixed bunch. Very few are helmetless, many are helmet Nazis (they love preaching safety and the wearing of helmets to others while they wear shorts in 20-degree weather on their 50-lbs overweight, heart-attack-ready bodies), and some are helmet neutral – they don’t think too much about your choices and why you make them. Most recently, I received the standard summary lecture from a very overweight, helmeted cyclist whose belly hung halfway between his seat and the ground, yet he gave me the snide lecture on no-helmet riding by summing it up as, “it’s your noggin.” Apparently, being without helmet for two hours is undertaking a risk while carrying around an obese, disease-ridden body for twenty years is no risk at all. It is astounding how folks will perceive peril and create their own twisted reality to suit their inclinations.

When I do the group rides, I usually wear a helmet unless it is so cold that I need to wear my warm, hippie beanie. Then I may go no-helmet, and immediately, the Nazis begin to buzz and give rise to the predictable comments…

Read more here

Related article…

1st Private Mission to Space Station Set to Launch April 30

by Mike Wall,
SPACE.com Senior Writer

A private spaceship mission to the International Space Station is on track for a planned April 30 launch, which will mark a historic first for the orbiting laboratory, NASA officials announced today (April 16).

The launch will kick off a pivotal demonstration flight for the unmanned Dragon capsule built by the company Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) of Hawthorne, Calif. During the mission, the gumdrop-shaped spacecraft will rendezvous with the space station, be captured by astronauts operating a robotic arm and offload some cargo.

If successful, it will be the first time a commercial American robotic spacecraft has ever flown to the International Space Station.

NASA space station managers and SpaceX officials met earlier today to review the Dragon spacecraft’s readiness for its debut trip to the orbiting lab. They said the capsule is on track to blast off in two weeks, but only if a few remaining issues are resolved.

“Everything looks good as we head towards the April 30 launch date, but I would caution us all that there’s still quite a bit of work that needs to be done,” Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations, told reporters today. More software validation tests for the Dragon spacecraft, for example, are among the items remaining to be completed.

“We’ll continue to work through this stuff over the next week or so,” he added. “On the 23rd of April, we’ll get back together again and just kind of assess where we are overall to see how things are moving forward.”

Making history

SpaceX aims to become the first company to launch a spacecraft toward the orbiting lab under NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, which seeks to spur the development of American private vehicles to take over the duties of the agency’s retired space shuttle fleet.

The firm holds a $1.6 billion contract with NASA to make 12 robotic supply missions to the space station. But the scheduled April 30 flight is not one of the 12; rather, it’s a demonstration to show that Dragon and SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket have the right stuff.

Read more here

Related…

Oxford English Dictionary Definitions

hemp 1) (in full Indian hemp) Asian herbaceous plant. 2) its fibre used to make rope and stout fabrics.

plastic – capable of being moulded; pliant, supple. The word plastic comes from the Greek “plastikos,” meaning “moldable.”

Conventional plastic is not biodegradable. This means that our landfills will grow and grow. Plastic materials are based on a finite resource that will not be available to future generations. Plastic has many uses, from packaging of food and industrial products, to insides of cars, casings of electronic items, film, storage bottles, containers and within a myriad of other industries

Bio-Based Plastics and Composites can be, and are used already to a great extent by industry, especially by the automotive, packaging and building industries. Estimates give a figure of about 500,000 tonnes a year and a two digit growth in the European Union.

Hemp Plastics can be five times stiffer and 2.5 times stronger than polypropylene, it will not cause wear and tear to the screw and the mould like glass fibres do, and unlike glass fibres, it does not pose safety and health risks. Its recoverable component comes from these natural plants and can occupy over half of its weight, up to 80 percent. All these features make it suitable for the production of durable products.

Hemp history is well documented. Hemp has been used for thousands of years for food, clothing, fuel and paper. Hemp is the non-drug form of cannabis. This industrial hemp is becoming known as the crop of the future. We are making it the crop of the present. In 1997 a company, a university, professors and other industry developed a 25% Hemp plastic product called ‘high fly’. This product was developed using unique expertise and resourceful corporations. Today, various grades of hemp plastics are available.

Visit Hemp Plastic

General Motors at work

You know, maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea if General Motors did go out of business.

What has the destruction of the nation’s street car system cost the country? A trillion dollars? Ten trillion dollars?

You’d have to add up all the oil consumed that didn’t have to be, all the environmental diseases that didn’t need to happen, and all the economic constraints on poor and low income people that didn’t need to be. Then there are the quality of life issues which are incalculable.

Go to super-prosperous cities like Basel and Zurich in Switzerland and you’ll see they excellent street car systems – just like we used to have in the US.

Not a dream, it works

It may seem that a lot of the videos on Brasscheck TV are “negative.”

Well, you can’t built something new until you expose and clean out all the crap.

As I mentioned to a friend recently “a lot of formerly deeply buried s*** is finally seeing the light of day these days.”

A new day is coming.

Human ingenuity is boundless and the good guys really do outnumber the bad guys. We just have to get better organized.

There’s a good reason the powers that be work so hard to try to dumb and beat us down. We’re damn hard to tame, and they know it.

If you want the plans for this car, they’re here:

http://www.sunnev.com