Endless Curiosity about science, math and universe

Bottom line: Volkswagen did not just make a dirty diesel car. It built software that knew when the car was being tested — and behaved clean only then. On the road, the same cars emitted up to 40 times the legal limit of nitrogen oxides. What finally caught them was not a regulator, but a small road test run on a $50,000 research grant. What was the "defeat device"? A defeat device is software that changes a car's behavior when it detects an emissions test. Volkswagen's version watched the steering wheel, the wheels, and the driving pattern. If the wheels were turning but the steering wheel was not — a sign the car was on a test rig — the software switched to a clean, low-emission mode. In normal driving, it switched back to a mode that gave better performance and fuel economy, but released far more nitrogen oxides (NOx) than the law allowed. NOx is not just a number on a chart. It irritates lungs, worsens asthma, and contributes to smog. Diesel engines are efficie...

In short: John Ernst Worrell Keely promised a motor that needed no coal, no steam and almost no fuel at all — only a mysterious new force he called etheric force. For about 26 years, investors kept paying while the motor stayed just out of reach. When investigators finally cut open one of his wires, they found not a wire at all, but a hollow tube. Who was John Keely? Keely was a Philadelphia inventor who began promoting his work in the 1870s. He was not a trained physicist, but he was a vivid showman. In his workshop, machines trembled, sang and spun, and visitors left convinced they had glimpsed the next age of power. What they had mostly glimpsed was a performance: demonstrations were carefully staged, and the inner workings were never left open for a full, independent test. What did the motor supposedly do? Keely claimed he had tapped a hidden force in nature, sometimes described as etheric vibration. A small amount of water or air, he said, could be made to release enormous power....

The short answer: Element 118, announced by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1999, never existed. The three atoms reported by first author Victor Ninov were not in the experiment's raw data at all — the only evidence for them was lines in text files that he had rewritten himself. This is Science Fraud Series No. 13, and its lesson is blunt: ask to see the original data, because authority is no substitute for evidence. The Korean version is 니노프 사건이란 무엇일까? What was announced in 1999? In May 1999 Berkeley announced three atoms of element 118, seen through their decay into element 116, and the paper appeared in Physical Review Letters that August with 15 authors. An element's number is its proton count. Nothing beyond element 92 occurs naturally, so every superheavy element is artificial, and element 118 was special: it would complete row 7 of the periodic table and sit in the noble-gas column. A name was already being discussed — ghiorsium. Why do scientists read dec...