NASA Still Trying to Verify Anti-Gravity Claims

uncoda writes "The L.A. Times has an article about NASA research into a phenomenon in which the effect of gravity is supposedly reduced. It sounds like cold fusion or polywater to me, but who knows?" We've posted two previous stories about Podkletnov's research: one from a couple of years ago and another more recently.

antigrav felines

[Mr.Coffee]

i swear to god that cat's must have these things in them.

which brings up a point in itself, the age old open-faced peanut butter sandwhich on the back of a cat argument.

Re:Getting Dizzy...

[bollocks]

Would your lunch be 2% of your weight?

If it is true...

[Jucius Maximus]

There will be a whole new rush of 'effortless weight loss' products on the market. (Not mass loss.)

The Human Mindset...

[Zspdude]

Is this just me or is there a grain of truth to this.... Once again we see Humans trying to break another law. No matter what the law, or how important it is, we want to break it. Gravity, conservation of energy, prohibition: pick a law and humans can be seen diligently trying to disobey it. Is it good for us to do so? We don't care, just as long as no-one ever tells us what to do. Oh well, we've been dangerously willful beings thus far and I guess since we're still hanging around... Maybe we're just lucky punks.

Fuck Slashdot! Fuck it hard!!!

[Serial Troller]

• 2002. Slashdot publishes 1,000,000th rumor passed off as actual story. The story generates 480 comments, 263 of which agree with the article, and 107 of which point out its a rumor and are modded down as redundant. The remaining comments are all first posts.
• 2002. CmdrTaco married to Kathleen Fent. Many geeks believe Kathleen, a purported transvestite, outmeasures CmdrTaco.
• 2002. Slashdot parent corporation VA Research^W Linux^W Software stock worth 35 cents. Rumors that AOL, Microsoft, or even Jimmy the hobo who lives under the Longfellow Bridge may buy it.
• 2003. VA Software bought by Microsoft for a cup of coffee and a donut. All Microsoft-critical articles mysteriously disappear from Slashdot. Bill Gates as Borg logo replaced with Bill Gates as God.
• 2003. Papperatzi videos of Miguel de Icaza caught going down on Bill Gates in his private yacht spread across Usenet. Miguel swears that recent decisions to rename the Gnome desktop to Windows NT 6.0 have nothing to do with it.
• 2004. CmdrTaco loses hist virginity.
• 2004. The WIPO Troll returns again, showering Slashdot in 45,000 copies of the same post: Lick my crotch hairs. Slashdot, despite running on 18 redundant IIS/8.0 servers, buckles under the load. The term Slashdotted is replaced with WIPO-Trolled.
• 2004. Slashdot, the last vestige of VA Research^W Linux^W Software^W Microsoft, officially shut down. Millions of screaming, unwashed geeks invade Redmond campus and lynch Bill Gates. CmdrTaco is believed to posess the only remaining copy of the Slashdot database on several hundred CD-Rs.
• 2005. The Linux is world is shocked when Linus Torvalds and Anal Cox are found dead along with six penguins, an empty tub of crisco and several used condoms. Millions of screaming, unwashed geeks invade Redmond campus and lynch Steve Ballmer.
• 2005. CmdrTaco rumored to have had sex again.
• 2006. CowboiKneel found dead in hotel room with 56 pizza boxes covering his bloated corpse. Three suffocated gay prostitutes are extracted from beneath his body as police remove it with a backhoe.
• 2007. CmdrTaco actually has sex again. With a woman.
• 2007. BSD is still officially dying. No word on when its demise will take place.
• 2007. CmdrTaco starts new weblog to replace Slashdot, creatively named Dotslash. Remainder of Linux users flock to the site and immediate WIPO-Troll it out of existence.
• 2008. CmdrTaco has sex with his wife for the first time.
• 2009. After years of living under the heel of his domineering wife, and being deprived of companyof his life-long friend, Jeff Homos Bates, CmdrTaco commits suicide. Another unwashed geek mob gathers and tears Kathleen Fent to shreds. Geeks discover Ms. Fent was indeed a woman, but dont exactly know what that means. Driven by their sexually-repressed rage, they subsequently invade Redmond again and lynch the current CEO of Microsoft, Miguel deIcaza.
• 2009. Richard Stallman mysteriously murdered. Conspiracy theories run rampant, most involving Microsoft in some way. Invasions of Redmond campus by hordes of geeks become commonplace.
• 2010. Stallman murder solved when Eric S. Raymond confesses. Raymond blamed the collapse of VA Research^W Linux^W Software^W Microsoft on Stallmans dogmatic insistence on prefixing every open-source project with GNU. Raymond is subsequently committed to an insane asylum, again giving the horde of geeks an excuse to raze Redmond.
• 2010. An ex-hacker reports witnessing CmdrTaco at a gas station in Tennessee. The nearly-defunct Linux movement is rekindled as CmdrTaco sightings become common.
• 2011. Microsoft campus burnt to the ground by screaming, unwashed geek mob after Microsoft is blamed when a Linuxhacker in Cambridge, Massachusetts spills his coffee on his pants. Microsoft undaunted as their plans to buy out the Federal Government come to fruition. Washington, D.C. renamed Microsoft Capitol 2010.

Re:antigrav felines

[Anonymous Coward]

On a note related to your cat-sandiwch complex: As kids, we wanted to see what would happen if you placed a slinky on an escalator. We reckoned that the slinky would fall forever, if it fell in synch with the escalator. One day we tried it out. We went to the mall, slinky in hand, and we dropped the slinky on the escalator and retreated to watch from the floor above. Our slinky stopped working a few seconds later and before we could reach it, got caught in the top of the escalator.

randal and dante

[oo7tushar]

will finally get their flying car, perhaps from the german scientist? http://www.viewaskew.com/tv/leno/flyingcar.html [viewaskew.com]

Re:WHERE ARE THE FLYING CARS@?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know this may be a tad offtopic (PLEASE DO NOT MODERATE AT ALL), but there is an interesting funny "flying car" video here [mac.com]. It is written by Kevin Smith (Mallrats, Clerks, etc.) and it features the guys from Clerks.

Whats todays date?

[Linuxthess]

For a second I thought it was April 1st.

The article states "The Podkletnov effect suggests it may be possible to effectively reduce the mass of the ship, thereby reducing the overall energy needed for acceleration."

Now as every semi-educated idiot knows, Mass and Weight are two different measures. Mass is an immutable constant, while weight is strictly based on the strength of the gravational field.

In other words wieght can vary, but mass will never.

I did a Google search on this "paranoid" scientist and I couldn't find anything negative.
---------------

It would work great in space.

[gnovos]

Yes, in space your weight will be reduced by 2% by this device. Since you "weigh" zero, and 2% of zero is also zero, it won't seem like much...

Re:Poor Article Poor chances

[drik00]

not to totally "me too" here about the gravity/mass thing, but, did anyone else find it ironic/funny that such a grossly innaccurate statement was made by a reader named "quantaman"?

Just an observation.

Re:AntiGravy

[Bronster]

I love how the web has made every Kook with a website an "Editor"

As opposed to the printing press?

(totally off topic - but all the web has done has made it even easier to be a kook)

Bron (Scientific Advisor: Slashdot.org, On The Web, In Crayon)

What about this one

[Anonymous Coward]

My setup is by far much simpler. A desk fan rotating at about 1000 RPM blowing air upwards at room temperature. A polystyrene ball of diameter aproximately 2 cm placed over it will lose weight by at least 50 %. And guess what, it costs about 0% of $600K to setup but it actually works. And you don't need very precise conditions.

Where is my Nobel prize!

--Real inovations in science make things easier to understand not more complicated

Re:Flying Discs

[Carp Flounderson]

I'm going to follow this insight of yours and derive a new branch of crackpottery based on rotating squares.

I lost mass in Finland!

[Alex Reynolds]

The food in Finland is an excellent way to lose mass! I lost a great deal of weight from being immersed in a repulsive Finnish Electro-herring Field for two weeks. I was then subjected to a four hour experiment involving approximately 1.5 liters of vodka and a sauna. I spun around, vomited profusely and eventually lost more than 2% of my body mass! Finland rocks!

Re:Poor Article Poor chances

[Paradise Pete]

If you witness/measure less gravitational force in a system, you can conclude at least one of three things

Actually my wife found a handy little dial on the bottom of her scale that lets her reduce the apparent mass at will. It's especially effective after parties the night before.

cross post

[Prowl]

shouldn't this belong in the "outrageous vendor lies" thread.

still, i won't have to worry about my diet...

another component

[Anonymous Coward]

"Using current rocket technology," they note, "a trip to the next star would easily consume the mass-energy equivalent of a planet in order to arrive within a reasonable lifetime." Technologies like nuclear fission and fusion offer some hope, "but still will not support the 'Star Trek' vision of space exploration."

I'm not sure what this anti-gravity thing has to do with having hot chicks in space.

I invented an antigravity machine

[Anonymous Coward]

I invented an antigravity machine, but it floated away.

Re:DBZ

[NanoGator]

So can a bow-flex! Heh =)