In a world where everything from our automobiles to our underwear may soon run on electricity, more efficient portable power is a major concern. After a century of stagnation, chemical and ultracapacitor batteries have recently made some strides forward, and more are on the horizon. But the most promising way of storing energy for the future might come from a more unlikely source, and one that far predates any battery: the flywheel.

In principle, a flywheel is nothing more than a wheel on an axle which stores and regulates energy by spinning continuously. The device is one of humanity’s oldest and most familiar technologies: it was in the potter’s wheel six thousand years ago, as a stone tablet with enough mass to rotate smoothly between kicks of a foot pedal; it was an essential component in the great machines that brought on the industrial revolution; and today it’s under the hood of every automobile on the road, performing the same function it has for millennia—now regulating the strokes of pistons rather than the strokes of a potter’s foot.

Ongoing research, however, suggests that humanity has yet to seize the true potential of the flywheel. When spun up to very high speeds, a flywheel becomes a reservoir for a massive amount of kinetic energy, which can be stored or drawn back out at will. It becomes, in effect, an electromechanical battery.

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About four hundred years ago– sometime in the latter half of the 17th century– Isaac Newton received a letter from the brilliant British scientist and inventor Robert Hooke. In this letter, Hooke outlined the mathematics governing how objects might fall if dropped through hypothetical tunnels drilled through the Earth at varying angles. Though it seems that Hooke was mostly interested in the physics of the thought experiment, an improbable yet intriguing idea fell out of the data: a dizzyingly fast transportation system.

Hooke’s calculations showed that if the technology could be developed to bore such holes through the Earth, a vehicle with sufficiently reduced friction could use such a tunnel to travel to another point anywhere on the on Earth within three quarters of an hour, regardless of distance. Even more amazingly, the vehicle would require negligible fuel. The concept is known as the Gravity Train, and though it seems inconceivably difficult to construct, it has received some serious scientific attention and research in the intervening centuries.

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To many it seems unlikely that a universe could spring into being from chaos, and achieve a level of organization advanced enough to allow for life—let alone intelligence. After all, if an electron were only twice the size that it is, chemistry as we know it couldn’t exist. If the Strong and Weak nuclear forces were out of proportion, stars mayn’t work. Over the centuries a number of theories have cropped up to try to explain life, the universe, and everything, but almost none propose to explain how it all came together. As with many problems that are too grandiose to grapple, however, sometimes it’s best to start on a smaller scale.

Evolutionists and naturalists have long observed Earth’s “natural selection” where most creatures create offspring with slightly different characteristics than their own. Those with characteristics better suited to the environment will thrive, procreate, and pass on their heritage; whereas offspring less suited will wither, reproduce less, and their traits will fade and vanish.

Theoretical physicist Lee Smolin looked at the simple, functional elegance found in the the theory of natural selection, and thought that maybe such a concept could be applied on a universal scale. Thus the theory of Cosmological Natural Selection was born.

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Without a doubt baseball has had more serious study behind it than any other major sport. It’s hard to say why this is, but we don’t see academic studies on the flight trajectories of footballs or the effect of “soft rims” on basketballs but we do see plenty of research on baseball. Scholarly research papers on baseball have titles like, “An Experimental and Finite Element Study of the Relationship amongst the Sweetspot, COP, and Vibration Nodes in Baseball Bats” and “Determining Baseball Bat Performance Using a Conservation Equations Model with Field Test Validation.”

Very rarely do these scientists, mostly physicists, offer practical advice for players to take into the field, but they do come up with some interesting observations. And almost all of them have to do with the baseball-bat “collision sequence.”

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An inventor in Canada named John Hutchison is credited with one of science’s most unusual and controversial discoveries. It is described as a “highly-anomalous electromagnetic effect which causes the jellification of metals, spontaneous levitation of common substances, and other effects.” It is known as the Hutchison Effect, or the H-Effect for short.

What the H-Effect is purported to do is nothing short of extraordinary. It is said to cause objects to defy gravity, cause metal to spontaneously fracture, cause dissimilar materials to fuse (such as metal and wood), and other strange phenomena. Hutchison has captured the effect on video many times, and claims to have demonstrated it for scientists from U.S. Army intelligence. But the claims are mired in doubt because the effect is not reproducible, even by the discoverer himself.

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During World War II, German hydroelectric dams were lucrative targets for the Allies. Not only would busting one cut off a major source of power for Germany, but it would also cause destruction through flooding. Plus, it would bring the fight to Germany, rather than defending the Allies’ territory.

Finding a method for destroying the dams, however, proved difficult. Anything but a direct hit with a normal bomb would not do enough damage to break the dam, and bombs were not accurate enough at the time. A bomb powerful enough to destroy a dam via a direct hit would be too heavy for any conventional airplane to carry. On top of that, the dams were protected underwater by torpedo nets, so the only possible way to hit the dam would be against its wall, near the surface of the water. There were no bombs that could get around these problems. The British military found this dilemma unsolvable.

Then along came Barnes Wallis, who invented a bomb that capitalized on the same physics as skipping a stone over water.

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In 1957, German theoretical physicist Burkhard Heim publicly outlined a new idea for spacecraft propulsion. It was based on his new theory of physics which successfully described Einstein’s theory of Relativity within the framework of Quantum Mechanics, and it married the two so effectively that he became an instant celebrity. Such a goal was long sought by Einstein himself, but never realized.

Heim’s ideas described a “hyperdrive” which would locally modify the constants of nature in such a way that a vehicle would be allowed to travel at immense speeds, possibly faster than the speed of light. Such a propulsion system could theoretically reach Mars in under five hours, and neighboring stars within a few months.

But shortly after he announced his theory, Heim went into isolation, and took his theories and formulas with him. It would be years before his theories again resurfaced, but when they did, they attracted the attention of NASA, the U.S. military, and the Department of Energy.

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Next time you’re traipsing around in a wet, sandy, unfamiliar area, you had best be on your guard for the exotic material known as quicksand. If you’re not careful, you could lose your life. Or much more likely, a shoe.

Quicksand is one of the staple environmental hazards in cartoonish low-budget movies, where it has been known to quickly swallow unwitting persons as they wander through jungles and deserts. It is usually represented as a deep pool of sandy goo which blends in with its surroundings, lying in wait to slowly suck in anyone who attempts to traverse it. Barring any nearby vines or branch-wielding comrades, the victim will slowly sink until completely submerged. Unsurprisingly, real quicksand is pretty tame in comparison to Hollywood’s depiction, but traditional quicksand does have an evil cousin that would pose a grave threat to anyone who might stumble upon it… if it exists.

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