Rocket Man

the shaft that holds the front wheel is at an angle and the front axle is even further forward from that axis. that causes the front wheel to point in the direction the bike leans for shallow cambers. if you turn the forks around, the stability drops right out and it's near impossible to ride no hands. the gyro effect smooths that out and assists the same motion the center of gravity on a fairly normal bike is just infront of the seat post and just below the centre of the frame. you can put drinks there

where are the poles of the ring magnets? you can probably get something to float over it. if it's a speaker magnet then its a definite yes. the poles go straight through the centres making something of a pocket in the field strength. the biggest problem is getting the floating part balanced. as Mr Skeptic mentioned, magnets have a tendancy to flip. some comercial ones use a magnetic gyro. and a motor of some sort. (essentially a magnetic bearing)

i don't think there'll be much in the way of this sort of research until there's a greater understanding of the way the brain works. i suspect that the eureka moment or when the penny drops is like switching the process from one structure to another or adding another group of neurons to the mix. in that study, adding took a subtly different structure to subtracting, that difference could be measured. i think that in some instances it's about getting right set of neurons firing with just that little bit of background noise.

this website has some decent info about the basics of digital electronics. i know pretty much how to adapt a power supply but getting the timer/counter working properly will be the hard part. i'll see if i can brush up on my electronics enough. i'll try to explain how my idea works a little better. each time the reed trips, it adds one to a counter. each time the timer goes off, it reads the counter, then resets the counter. if the reading is too high, it runs the servo backwards for a fraction of a second, reducing the throttle. if the reading is too low, it runs the servo forward for a fraction of a second increasing the throttle. the counter should output each number on a separate pin of the chip on each pin above the standard count, get some AND gates looking at it's pin of counter and the timer all telling the throttle to go down. if the timer ticks while any one of these AND gates reads a high, the throttle will reduce a tiny bit. the timer should be variable so the wheel has to go around five or so times in a variable amount of time, changing the speed. the main chips you'll need are the 555 and the 4017 the 555 is a popular timer and the 4017 is a popular counter.

a black body as sharply defined boundaries just like any other object. (if one can be made) if you look at a cold, black-body-object, it looks jet black (\emphasis on jet black), any light you can see was reflected or made between you and it.

water expands (a lot) as it freezes. that is all. if you try to stop water expanding, it takes large amounts of high strengh steel.

you certianly can, although the budget gets pretty big if you go high power. the simplest coil gun you can make involves buying a roll of wire and connecting it to a high current source with a nail sitting in the back end. to go multi stage, get more wire and an optical switch. high voltage high current takes transistors that weigh a few kilos and they cost about $100 each. if you go low power, you can pick up a few cheap power transistors to do the switching, the coils are the same there's just more of them.

tie into the bike computer or the reed switch? actually, if you can put stuff on the speedo of the bike, you can do away with most of the gadgetry i described in the last post as well as the reed switch. if you build the servo linkage right, and build a tiny circuit, you can have the optical gear read the speedo and modify the throttle accordingly.

coil guns are electromagnetic accelerators as well! both involve equally dangerous euipment. a railgun is only more difficult because of the sliding contact.

if you go small scale, you can get a reliable firing with under 30V it's the feild strength that's important, get the coils as snug as possible to the projectile and get the current in there suddenly. nicad rechargable batteries give quite a good pulse, way beyond their ratings. if you want to do damage to the target, you need some expensive equipment.

i set the thing up again to get the shots but i remembered that the first few tests were done with insulated hook up wire. this is with thick copper so the hot glue melts after barely seconds i'm having trouble uploading the images, any suggestions?

basically, if you have a pulse circuit, and you use it to reset a counter which counts how many times the wheel goes round, the counter will sit with a fairly steady maximum count determined by how fast the bike goes. any reading substantially above the normal count, reduce the throttle. any count too far below the normal count, up the ante. if you paint some part of the bike black then with a dot of white, you might be able to get a count happening. increase the pulse rate that resets the counter, the faster the bike goes.

it all depends on how heat tolerant they are. if you want a CMOS IC, you'd probably be better off whiping out the dremel and grinding at the solder. if you get your pliers around the part and melt the solder, you can generally wrestle them out fairly easily.

have you heard of the "lifter"? it's a little device run off a remote high voltage source that does pretty much what you're describing. they tend to be made of foil and thinned skewers with almost zero payload capacity. they fly though, which is the cool part.

if i built one, i'd be tempted to put a motor of some sort on it.

iirc, water (all phases inclusive) is one of the most anomolous substances known.

i made an attempt at this one, edison inspired, it was an evacuated glass chamber with a filament (0.7mm pacer graphite) i made the evacuated chamber out of a jam jar and check valves from an aquarium retailer, it could go down to 10KPa.(drew air out of a continer and let water flow back into it on relief to check that.) the graphite was suspended by thick copper wire passed through the lid of the jam jar and connected to 16V 3A AC. the graphite glowed yellow and you could easily read by it but you could feel the heat coming off it... which lead to some hot glue melting and admitting air into the chamber, making the graphite smoke, arc, thin out and eventually break. i may have gotten 30 seconds of light out of it but it's hardly a winning formula.

the point is easier to defend if the chain slides off a frictionless platform. CPL.Luke is right, the OP assumed freefall, however, each link's accelleration is retared by the intertia of the link at the top which is initially stationary. if you factor everything in, conservation of energy is not violated.

combine navel gazing with quantum theory, go suitably mad and i'm sure you'll stumble on an acceptable answer.

tritium has a half life of about 12 years so you are not going to collect any of that. if you take six parts per thousand as the conc of heavy water, the concentration of DDO is probably 36 parts per million. if you want heavy water, you want to look for HDO and you'll need one hell of a centrifuge. i still doubt 6:1K, i'll do some research edit: from wiki

ice at 0 celcius still needs quite a bit of heat to melt, latent heat of fusion. while the pressure reduces the mp, it also squeezes liquid water out resulting in a wet boundary below zero. if the boundary is far enough below zero, the water can heat up to zero while going solid. has anyone seen a cable supporting weights over a block of ice? the ice forms over the cable. i tried it with nichrome wire and couldn't get enough tension out of it. so it does take a LOT of pressure. colder ice simply gets some water in the boundary and freezes it.

unless you're talking about tritium water(not naturally occuring) or DDO, heavy water has a molecular mass of very slightly less than 19. where did you get 18.053 for water?

heavy water is 17th heavier than ordinary water. i'd recomend electrolysing and putting the hydrogen gas in a centrifuge or chilling it to ridiculously low temperatures. or exposing ordinary hydrogen to a neutron source. (does that work?) six parts per thousand is a bit over the top by several orders of magnitude. 6ml of heavy out of a litre? i don't think so.

i wouldn't worry about voters or industry partners just yet, you're far from getting the most out of this idea. true you can get better efficiencies out of magnetic gears under low power scenarios, but you haven't even begun to scratch the surface of the potential here. so far i've only seen one or two configurations of identical gears your main design issues involve high rpm failure and high torque blade contact. also consider electromagnetic losses to nearby conductors/ferromagnetic objects.

right, so you bought a cruise control unit and you need a vacuum supply as the final touch to make it work? what output does it have? do you feed the vacuum to the unit or can you give it some other actuator? i have a few ideas about fudging together a digital system with an optical tacho, you could probably build the electronics into a soft drink can, if you have room for a cruise control unit, you'll have room for a servo on the throttle.