Steorn is back, and it is still hawking its perpetual-motion machine, the Orbo. We spent several carefree days back in the summer of 2007 ridiculing the whole project, which purported to use spinning ...

The search for a perpetual motion machine has been the chupacabra of physics for centuries. Multiple designs have been made, tested and, ultimately, found lacking. Perpetual motion machines are ...

On November 12th, 1717, clockmaker and mechanic Johann Bessler placed a 12-foot diameter, strange-looking wheel into a room. With a tender push, he started the contraption rotating, then confidently ...

On Sept. 20, 1913, rumors were running rampant around North Dakota that J. W. Kennedy, of Mandan, North Dakota, had invented just such a machine. A news clipping about J.W. Kennedy and his perpetual ...

A wheel weighted with swinging mallets. A cylinder rotating in a sealed, water-filled container. A siphon that transfers liquid back in forth in a seemingly endless loop. These may sound like the ...

The challenge: Use two mousetraps, six rubber bands, and $15 worth of materials to build a device that can safely transport a delicate, uncooked egg from an elevated platform to a target on the floor, ...

Last week, a "self sustaining electrical turbine generator" was found on Kickstarter. Another name for the product is a perpetual motion machine. (We saw this story first on GigaOm.) Put simply, a ...

Let's start with a water wheel in still water with an electric generator hooked up to it. Let's say it has a ratchet wheel so it can only turn in one direction. I want to calculate the probability ...

Perpetual motion devices are either a gag, a scam, or as in the case of this particular toy that [Big Clive] bought on AliExpress, a rather fascinating demonstration of a contact-free inductive sensor ...

PROBABLY your sense of justice will induce you to insert some very brief remarks on your review of my article in the Quarterly journal of Science. The tone of the review is a penalty which all who ...